


Notes on The Oracle of Settlement B1C7

by Spudnik



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Author Commentary, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:42:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 46,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23086477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spudnik/pseuds/Spudnik
Summary: Unnecessarily exhaustive commentary on the writing process for The Oracle of Settlement B1C7 (a story in which the gems have subjugated humanity.)Amongst other things I fill in a few background details about the AU, pick holes in my own story logic, and get weirdly defensive about stuff that nobody even complained about in the first place.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an author commentary on [The Oracle of Settlement B1C7](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892). You should probably only read this if you've already read the story and you _really_ want to know more about it.
> 
> Amongst other things, it contains additional background details about aspects of the setting that didn't make it into the final story. These details can be considered trivia. If anything mentioned here contradicts an assumption you made based on the text of the fic, and you prefer your version, this is fine. Either interpretation is valid.

> The Oracle of Settlement B1C7

Working title "beach city 17.txt". (Because the main concept is heavily inspired by Half-Life 2. This will come up repeatedly.) I'm not sure whether the title I went with was the ideal choice, as it does give away a major plot point that otherwise goes unmentioned for ten chapters. But I like to think its significance is difficult to identify in advance. The only other title I considered was "The Mystery of Settlement B1C7", which I think is too generic. I wanted people to think "An oracle? A settlement? A random collection of numbers and letters? What do any of these things mean? I must learn more!" Whether it works is another matter.

In case it is not abundantly clear, B1C7 is derived from Beach City and City 17.

> Chapter 1:

First, a note about chapters. I had already written a draft of the story, start to finish, which was 90% complete before I started posting anything. This was because I didn't know in advance whether I would be able to finish it, and I didn't want to be that person who abandons their fic halfway through and leaves the audience frustrated and grieving. It also meant I would be able to post chapters weekly without having to write quickly (which I am constitutionally incapable of doing.) The original draft was not written with chapter breaks in mind, and I retroactively divided it up into what I hoped were chunks of appropriate length. In many cases this involved dividing up what was otherwise a contained section of story (usually a day's worth of narrative), and I amended the text to try and make each chapter appear complete in itself. With varying success.

A lot of these annotations will consist of me pointing out sections that were added when I revised the story from its original draft, despite the fact that this is not intrinsically interesting.

> Leaving Settlement P5T7

This chapter title is bland and I have little to say about it. I didn't know at this point whether my chapter names should be blandly descriptive, or clever-clever allusions to stuff.

> Mrs Maheshwaran extinguished the waxlights one by one as she descended the staircase for the final time. The beige wallpaper dimmed in the half-reflected light of dawn.

This is how you begin a story when you want to signal that it is serious literature. Wallpaper dimming in half-reflected light, whatever that means. The first sentence is designed to grab the reader's attention by making them ask themself: Why is Priyanka not a doctor (answered in chapter 3; there are no doctors), and what is a waxlight? (Answered... sort of in chapter 20, but not really?)

However, in my very first conception of this opening sentence, the word was instead gaslights. This would have conjured an image of specific obsolete lighting infrastructure, but was abandoned for two reasons. First, I realised fuel gas would require mining and infrastructure unavailable to humans in the story. Second, gaslight? Gaslighting? The gems, gaslighting the humans? It's a bit on-the-nose for the very first sentence, isn't it?

The very next sentence was originally "Strange, given how she'd never liked the pattern, to realise how its familiarity had bred comfort over the years." But this was when I thought I would be writing from the perspective of various characters, a plan I swiftly abandoned. Instead, I added a similar spoken line in the hope of making the same point.

> Now after waking at cockcrow to be ready on time, she had spent more time than seemed reasonable sitting and waiting, staring at ornaments she would never see again.

Two things apparent from this: no alarm clocks due to the lower technology level, and objects in the house belong more to the building than the people living in it. This is largely because the humans have to travel light. The Diamond Authority does not provide a removal van.

> "It's wrong to hoard food," came the predictable response.

This is brought up early on, and reiterated a number of times in the story, but is deliberately not elaborated on because it is so ingrained in the characters' understanding of the world. Because humanity is struggling to produce enough food, it is unforgivable to misrepresent your own consumption in order to stockpile for the winter. Everything must be distributed fairly so the civic leader knows whether they really need to apply for a subsidy.

> Doug checked his pocket watch.

This is a rare item. Connie always needs to find a clock to know the precise time. By this point, there is nobody producing such intricate mechanical devices (or if they are, it's very rare.) So this is a very old watch that has been carefully maintained.

> A door revealed itself, swooshing open on an empty cabin fitted with enough seats for at least twenty people.

So begins a series of worldbuilding cues that indicate this is a world that used to contain more humans.

> In defiance of physics, there was no inertia to be felt, and the cases lay still where they had been set down.

I'm not sure if this is really consistent with gem technology in the show. If not, let's say it's because the rebellion never happened and a lot of clever gems went unshattered.

> Connie fervently wished there were windows so she could see how fast they were going. Or would this be a sight beyond the human mind's comprehension?

This is copied from the advent of rail travel, when people (supposedly) worried that moving that fast would make you suffocate or something.

> Actual details were scarce, however, beyond the fact of their relocation and the deadline.

Essentially, the jumping-off point of the story is based on a line early in Half-Life 2: "You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centres." The gems' methods are almost entirely divergent from the Combine, but we begin with the shared aspect of compulsory relocation.

> There were some cave-ins near the old house after an earthquake — the settlement wasn't in any danger, but it wasn't the best place for a growing child to be running around. I think a couple other families were moving too, for the same reason.

This might pass people by, but it's significant. The reason for the earthquakes and cave-ins is the ongoing excavation of the planet as part of the colonisation. It wouldn't have been long before all the remaining residents were moved on and the settlement disbanded.

> Settlement P5T7 was nice.

The settlement names are (in-universe) arbitrary, but for the letters here I was thinking of pear trees. Maybe they had some pear trees? The numbers are entirely arbitrary, and I fall for the classic psychological trap of fixating on the number 7. In my defence, it's perfectly possible for two settlements to end with the same number, and in fact makes the story _more_ realistic.

> "Good morning. Thank you for joining us. You can call me Moss Agate."

It's best not to introduce original gems, because so much of their character design is visual and the reader will be left with no mental picture. But you can cheat by having an Agate like in the show, and just making her green instead of blue.

> Before long they were ushered into a kind of office. It had been furnished with some seats designed to be comfortable for humans

Hmm. I thought I'd specified that there are a lot of these seats in the room (like on the transport), but I guess I didn't. Well... there are. Retcon. Word of god.

> "It's alright. We know this can be a difficult process, especially with a thirteen-year-old... girl?"

Moss Agate spends a lot of time managing humans' lives but has not taken enough of an interest to familiarise herself with their genders. It's possible I don't need to point this out here.

> Food subsidies have been on the increase, and while this is never an issue in terms of our own resources, it does not bode well for the ongoing self-sufficiency of the settlement. So this is just one step in an ongoing process of scaling down settlement P5T7 to a more realistic size.

As is made clearer later on, 'subsidy' is a euphemism for a delivery of synthetic fruit to ensure people don't starve in the winter. The more realistic size of settlement P5T7 is likely to tend toward 'zero'.

> Mr Maheshwaran, your Zircon speaks very highly of your peacekeeping efforts, but let's be frank: in such a small community there's precious little for you to actually do. Really, what trouble could there be? Mediating the occasional dispute over a horse?

So, what is a peacekeeper? Obviously, a bit like a cop. They are also the arm of the Diamond Authority in the settlement. As Doug is a security guard in canon, it seemed to make sense to give him this role. Taking a cue from Half-Life, I gave the role a euphemistic, Orwellian name. I hope the vague reference here to resolving disputes is enough to make the reader fill in the gaps about what the role actually entails, because I didn't think it through in that much detail. I think that in cases of actual violence, the offender would be reported and subsequently removed by the Diamond Authority to a mysterious fate.

> You must miss teaching classes. Settlement B1C7, where you will be located, is large enough to sustain a small education centre.

I can't remember exactly why I made Priyanka a teacher. It puts her in a position of some authority, which suits her character. Really, she could have been the peacekeeper if it didn't already match Doug's real job.

'Education centre' is also a tad Orwellian. You will still hear characters referring to 'school', but this is not inconsistent. It is the name for the activity that takes place at the education centre.

> a number of autonomous manufactories run by local residents for the benefit of the community.

There's a bit of a linguistic fudge here. I picked 'manufactory' as an old-timey alternate form of 'factory', to give the sense of how terminology has evolved differently without the Industrial Revolution. But I'm not sure this is supported by the actual etymology. I initially assumed manufactory had been shortened to derive factory, but factory is really the earlier form (the place of a 'factor'.) Manufactory is a portmanteau, like brunch, or podcast. (See? They're not all modern.)

> However, as this will be your first time living in a coastal settlement, there is just one thing I wish to make clear at this stage: the ocean is dangerous. I am aware that humans have a fascination with bodies of water. Do not be tempted to enter the ocean, or we will be unable to guarantee your safety.

I honestly can't recall whether I made the ocean so dangerous because of gem activity on Earth, or whether that was post-facto justification for an arbitrary decision. I may just have decided it would be appropriate for there to be something vaguely sinister and alien about the characters' surroundings.

Still, the in-story reason, not revealed until the epilogue, is that the gem project of hollowing out the Earth has advanced to the point that the existence of the ocean has to be artificially maintained. It's entirely possible, but never brought up, that the atmosphere could also need to be artificially regulated for the humans' continued survival. An unknown number of Lapis Lazulis are under the water, holding it back from flowing through the Earth's crust. The forces exerted on the ocean reverberate all the way to the coast.

> Gems didn't sleep, they didn't die. Their technology was beyond incomprehensible.

There is some focus on what the humans do and don't know about gems. Here we observe that they do know the things that make gems seem powerful.

> "We took your luggage through already," she was saying.

As revealed many chapters later, the luggage is routinely searched.

> "No, not at all. Can't fault the Authority on efficiency, at least!"

The call-back to this ended up in the next chapter, which is a possible downside of the way I divided things up.

> Barbara smiled indulgently. "Good question. I assist William Dewey — he's the civic leader — with various things, delivering goods, distributing announcements, and of course escorting folks like your good selves."

Her brief mention of delivering things is the tenuous link to Barbara's canon job. You'll notice I don't really follow up on this with her ever actually doing it.

> There's tailoring, so if you're patient you can have a few clothes that aren't hand-me-downs. There's a workshop and forge that anyone can use.

Here I am desperately trying to give an impression of how the settlement works without having to actually do any research or make it make sense.

> Most of the citizens donate some of their allotment space for the manufactories. If you can grow a little cotton, or sugar beet, that'll go a long way for us, 'cause we just can't put those crops in the general rotation.

So, the allotments. Traditionally this is a share of a plot of land, but in this timeline it has subsumed the concept of a garden. Instead of a garden, each house has an adjoining allotment. Everyone has to have the same amount of land. And I didn't specifically state this in the story, but nobody cultivates flowers or any aesthetic plants. Every available inch of land is given over to food production. Mainly, people grow their own vegetables to supplement the harvest from the common fields.

> I must be honest, when we heard we were moving, a part of me couldn't help worrying that we'd somehow done something wrong.

I'm not sure how consistent this is with what follows. Connie is later dismayed to learn the Authority moves people as punishment. Is Priyanka confirming it as a possibility here, or just expressing what she thinks of as groundless paranoia? Or do they know this stuff goes on due to their work, and it goes over Connie's head? I left a lot of things vague in the story so I could get away with stuff like this.

> A silence fell as they rode past fields of corn which rippled under gusts of wind.

Why are they already running out of things to talk about? Why, it's because earlier on I said it'd take an hour to get to the settlement, and I worried people might complain if the time was inadequately filled. "This is, at best, ten minutes of dialogue," they would say. "Explain yourself." So I inserted a silence of indeterminate length. I've a feeling this isn't the only time I pulled this stunt.

> "We've not had any major problems — the occasional light year but that's been down to freak weather, I think. There are years when we don't need a subsidy. Certainly there's been no talk of downsizing the settlement. No, we're fine as far as I can tell. Of course, back in the old days..."

Underlying this, but largely unexplored for the duration of the story, is the idea that there might be something unnatural about the weather in this world. Barbara is defensive about the productivity of the settlement, but she verges on an admission that there has been a noticeable decline within living memory. Then, there is another indeterminate silence. See? I told you I did it again.

> "Oh, you have a child? ...Congratulations,"

The first hint that reproduction has been curtailed, another aspect of the setting heavily influenced by Half-Life.

> At the near end of the settlement, a water tower was placed uphill from the other structures.

The water tower is partly there to match the one in the show. But I also wanted to establish the existence of some less primitive infrastructure in the world. The advantage of written fiction is that people can just picture whatever makes sense to them, but I didn't want it to seem like a world that hasn't moved on at all from the 18th century. I wanted it to be more like modern times with several important technologies subtracted.

> Barbara exchanged greetings with a couple of passers-by as they neared the bottom of the hill. Seeing the figures of other children in the distance, Connie suddenly became overwhelmed and sank down in her seat, not ready to interact. To her left and right were buildings that had appeared almost like toys when viewed from the crest of the hill. This street alone comprised as many houses as she had ever seen.

I added this paragraph to make Connie seem nervous and justify the chapter break coming up.

> Inside the building, a middle-aged man with a bald patch surrounded by unruly long hair was feeding horses.

The stables are, of course, analogous to the car wash. Thus, Greg still has a job maintaining vehicles.

> Connie's parents got out of the carriage, and Mrs Maheshwaran immediately approached Greg. "Thank you very much, you're most helpful. The largest case contains some books and is quite heavy, so be careful."
> 
> "Hey, no problem," the stableman grinned, "I'm tougher than I look."
> 
> "Now," Priyanka continued, "the smaller green case contains seeds which are separately packaged, and it would be a disaster if these were to become mixed up, so..." Greg's smile became strained as he found himself on the receiving end of a short lecture on the importance of careful handling.
> 
> Connie noted that no such warnings had been issued to the Amethyst who had helped them earlier.
> 
> "Come on, kiddo." Her dad was beckoning her. "You ready to see our new settlement?"
> 
> Connie found, to her surprise, that she wasn't. Everything so far had been little more than a series of impressions as she was transported through new and dazzling environs. Interacting with them would be a different matter. Now, she would have to immerse herself in the unfamiliar situation and it would all become real.
> 
> She focused on her dad's expectant smile, and put her feelings of trepidation to one side. "Let's go," she said, and climbed down from the carriage to begin exploring their new home.

This entire section was shoehorned in to make it feel like the end of a chapter. Originally, Connie just hopped out and the story continued. Still, it gave me the opportunity to insert the detail of the luggage containing seeds. If a settlement doesn't have a particular crop, they have no way of acquiring it unless somebody happens to bring it in. So it is not only good etiquette to bring a selection of seeds, it could potentially be the only way to continue enjoying your favourite herb or vegetable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If for some reason you read this far without having read [The Oracle of Settlement B1C7](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892) and it seems at all interesting to you, I would strongly recommend you go and read that first. I will be casually spoiling major plot developments throughout this commentary, in an unstructured fashion that will make it a poor substitute for a plot summary.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 2](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/49533122).

> Chapter 2: A Gift From The Gems

Another relatively bland title. However, you could choose to read into it a double-meaning. It could refer to the gift of food, or the gift... of anxiety! See, now it is deep and meaningful.

> Mr Maheshwaran dug out his pocket watch. "Looks like I need to adjust this. We must be halfway round the world."

I wrote on the basis of settlement P5T7 being either in Australia or somewhere of the same longitude. Quite a large proportion of the first 25% of the story is concerned with the effects of instantaneous long-distance travel between time zones. It would be like jet-lag, but without the fatigue of having endured an hours-long journey in cramped conditions. If you don't find this as fascinating as I do, then I apologise for the first five chapters.

As an aside, I hope it's not weird to refer to Connie's dad variously as 'Doug' and 'Mr Maheshwaran' in a story written ostensibly from her perspective. I became convinced it would seem too repetitive if I didn't switch things up a bit.

> The manufactories were mostly single-storey structures, coloured in pleasant pastel shades. In some places, weathered brickwork was visible where the stucco had cracked and fallen away. Most of the frontages were adorned with lettering or symbols indicating the building's function. A saw and hammer hung over one of the doors, orange with rust.

This passage wasn't in the first draft, but it was bothering me that I hadn't really said anything about what the buildings in the settlement look like. My hope is that, given this fleeting imagery of building materials and condition, the reader will extrapolate to come up with something more realistic and consistent than I could write.

I did more research on the effects of sea air on building materials and metals than you might expect (i.e. more than zero.)

> The story goes that people used to go out there in fishing boats, but I can tell you nobody's tried anything that risky in living memory.

This is also changed from the first draft. Originally, she said "but that's not been safe for as long as anyone can remember." I changed it because I didn't like the confirmation that people knew it had once been safer.

> I make flatbreads of all flavours using a special recipe I brought with me from a disbanded settlement.

This erasure of pizza as a concept is not necessarily to imply that it doesn't exist anywhere. But this is not a global society, and the availability and knowledge of cultural dishes is based largely on happenstance. In this timeline, they've ended up with a version closer to Greek tradition. The stupid thing is that for quite a while, the family was still going to retain the surname of Pizza, like this was just coincidentally their surname even though nobody knew it was the name of a food. Fortunately I realised this would have been intensely ridiculous.

> "Well, good evening folks. Nice to meet you. I'm guessing you're here to fill the vacancies in the civic administration?" He smiled fondly, as if moved by the concept.
> 
> "Something like that," Doug responded.
> 
> Mr Fryman seemed momentarily lost in a reverie. Snapping out of it, he clapped his hands together.

Fryman's behaviour here was a hastily-written addition to the original draft, to address a fairly egregious plotting issue. It turned out that, somehow, I didn't fully understand the timeline of my own story. For some reason I was stuck on this idea that Mrs Fryman had been gone for quite a long time. But according to the story as presented, it must only have been a few weeks ago. It seems important to reiterate: I somehow failed to understand the plot of the story that I personally was in the process of writing.

Mr Fryman remains a bit of a cipher for the rest of the story, but these sentences are intended to hint that he is processing what has happened in his own way.

> We package up the food and you can continue with your day.

In a strange manoeuvre, I have transposed the concept of takeaway food into this timeline, and then tried to impose an ideological significance onto it.

> Their luggage was sitting just outside the front door.

It's a minor thing, but you can leave your stuff lying around in the open and not worry too much about it being taken. Everyone knows each other and nobody can leave.

> Oh, the allotment is round the back — I'm afraid it'll probably need a bit of work.

I didn't really intend anything by this when I wrote it, but I suppose (at a stretch) you could infer that even though the Maheshwarans are treated as befitting important new residents, a family's allotment is always their own responsibility. It wouldn't have occurred to anyone to prepare it for them.

> With a burst of energy, Connie launched into a swift tour of the house.

I have a vague image in my head of the layout of the house, but it doesn't actually make geometric sense. So whatever the reader derives from the description is fine.

> There was a drawing room

Again, going with a bit of old-timey terminology to emphasise how society has developed in ways that are alien to us.

> a bathroom with a shower cubicle

Indoor plumbing and running water are very much a thing. As previously stated, I wanted to give the impression that there has been some innovation and development within the settlements, and it is not simply 18th century life transposed to the present day.

The question of toilet facilities is studiously ignored.

> There was a potted history detailing the construction and improvement of some of the buildings over time — supposedly the windmill was converted from a historic lighthouse more than a hundred years ago.

I've no idea how feasabile it is to convert a lighthouse into a windmill, but I remain inordinately pleased with the symbolism in doing so.

> Connie tried to judge the size based on their journey — the warp pad was marked on the map, about three-quarters of the way to the edge in one direction, but there was a larger area over to the left which they had not passed through.

One could extrapolate from this a vague idea of the total size of the settlement and fields. I can't remember whether I performed some kind of back-of-an-envelope calculation to come up with a plausibly realistic area. I suspect there aren't really enough details given to prove it either way. If it's too small, we just say there aren't as many people as you thought. If it's too big, we excuse it by saying more fields are needed because you get less food per square mile from this soil.

> Mrs Maheshwaran had never given the impression that she respected Mrs Thompson, the civic leader at settlement P5T7, and Connie had never known whether this was a reflection of the woman or the position.

I tried not to introduce new characters, because I believe this is generally not what people come to fan fiction sites for. But it was necessary to name this never-seen character.

> Connie emptied the fist-sized synthetic berries onto the table and began sorting them by colour, in a tradition dating back to her early childhood. Each colour had a unique flavour, impossible to relate to any naturally-grown food, but delicious nonetheless. As she got older, though, her enjoyment of the treat became gradually diminished by her growing awareness that they only received the fruits when they had failed to grow enough food for the settlement.

Clearly these are equivalent to the food given to the inhabitants of the Human Zoo in the show. Food subsidies from the gems come in the form of these fruits, and humans have been led to believe that it is their fault that this is necessary. I hope this was already clear, but it's worth restating as it's one of the fundamental concepts behind the premise.

> It's not hoarding if it's a gift from the gems... is it?

Connie gets a little taste of the hypocrisy of power here. The gems are above morality because anything they do must be correct by default, and they have been shown favour by the gems. In fact this doesn't make it suddenly okay to hoard food, but Connie is not in a position to understand this.

> "I've read about twins in storybooks, but I didn't know they were real."

This should indicate how weirdly insular life is in a settlement, and how little the residents know about the wider world.

> "Well, you'd have to be Choosened twice, I suppose. But I'd never heard of it happening until today."

Although the name is borrowed from the Human Zoo, it's worth restating the influence of Half-Life 2 on this story's origin. In that game, the Combine have suppressed all reproduction to effectively doom humanity to extinction within a generation. Because Pink Diamond wants to preserve some of humanity, she is instead allowing limited reproduction. This is a means by which the gems can enforce the decline and closure of settlements, and ultimately reduce the population until humanity can be relocated off-world. The fact that Choosening was available as a name to apply to this process was, in a way, merely a happy coincidence.

> "Did you ever wonder if it was really, truly random? Of all things, this convinces me it is."

It's not entirely random, because births are assigned to settlements according to the required population level in that area. Also, the gems would make choices that promote a healthy level of genetic diversity within small communities. But within this, I suppose it's possible they picked the Frymans twice by chance.

> "Maybe I could get some new clothes made," Connie suggested.
> 
> Her mother looked doubtful. "That's all very well, but you're liable to get taller again, and then where will we be?"
> 
> "But I'll need something to wear in the winter-time, right?"
> 
> Priyanka was unmoved. "You can wear your dungarees with a jacket over your shirt when it gets cold."
> 
> "Oh, go on," Connie wheedled. "I can hardly wear the same dungarees all winter."
> 
> Her mom gave her an appraising glower. "Show me you can go more than a couple of weeks without damaging your existing clothes and we'll think about it."
> 
> Connie sat back in satisfaction at this hard-earned victory. Still, it represented no guarantee. She glanced down at the series of overlapping patches which comprised much of the front of her long shorts. These coincided with the respective positions of her knees as she had grown into them. (They had once been more akin to short longs.)

This is another addition made while tidying up the chapter for publication. As with the buildings, I was concerned that I hadn't really addressed the question of what the characters look like — as in, what do they wear? The main reason for this was that I hadn't really decided on anything specific. So with this passage I hoped to give the impression that Connie's outfit is not entirely unlike something she might wear in the show, but older and in less pristine condition.

The fortunate thing about this is that it provided an opportunity to work in some subtle foreshadowing. Now, hear me out on this. I fell and grazed my knees a bunch of times when I was a little kid. As the patches indicate, Connie has continued to do so as she has grown taller. Why should this be? Well, it's because it didn't hurt so much, and instead of being all scabbed over for days, her knees healed up immediately. Pain is unpleasant, but it can be a great teacher.

It's stated matter-of-factly a few times that the organic regulator heals physical injuries, and beyond this a big deal is never made of it until it becomes of pivotal importance.

> There were some rather dry reference books about agriculture and manufacturing, next to a dictionary which covered the letters A to M (its companion volume being conspicuously absent.)

It being the first volume of the dictionary was an arbitrary choice on my part, and any future references to contents are emergent from this decision.

> _Robinson Crusoe_ looked to be an older title, along with _Don Quixote_. Next to this one were two newer volumes, different in size, both entitled _The New Adventures of Don Quixote_. A brief look at each revealed no author attribution, but the text was clearly different.

What you are witnessing here is the undignified spectacle of somebody insecure about writing fan fiction and seeking refuge in literary precedent. Cervantes was vexed when somebody released a fraudulent sequel to _Don Quixote_ before he could finish his own. Here we find not one, but two fan-written sequels to the novel.

> This theme continued with _The New and Further Adventures of Lemuel Gulliver_ , and _The New Adventures of Tristram Shandy_ , neither of which were accompanied by the novels they were presumably continuations of.

As with plants, the only books in the settlement are those that people happen to have brought in. The continuing unavailability of _Gulliver's Travels_ is intended to emphasise this. To us, it is one of the most famous books still remembered from the 18th century, but this is irrelevant in Connie's timeline. She is stuck analysing fan fiction without the primary work to help her understand it.

 _Gulliver's Travels_ became more significant later on, but this was initially meant to be only a fleeting reference. As for _Tristram Shandy_ , due to its bizarre postmodern structure, the idea of a fan-written direct sequel is inherently ridiculous to me and thus highly amusing.

> In the kitchen, she selected a tall glass and opened the tap. A little sediment came through before the water ran clear, and she angled the glass to fill it quietly.

While not actively unpleasant, the water is not necessarily sanitary by our standards. This points to humanity's total reliance on the organic regulator, which Connie comes to realise over the next few chapters.

> "Where is the old teacher? Where's the old peacekeeper? What was so urgent that they had to be moved without any notice?"

Two of these questions will ultimately be answered, to a great extent. But where is the old teacher? And who is the old teacher?

I don't know.

This may seem like negligence on my part, and perhaps it is. But here's the problem I faced. Many of the characters in Steven Universe are from single-parent families. This is plausible and realistic. But in this timeline, it raises questions. Sure, parents could have split up, but where are they? They can't just leave the settlement by choice. So one could very well ask what happened to Mrs Pita, Mrs Fryman, Mrs Dewey and Mr Miller. (Perhaps they are present but never mentioned?)

In a way this let me have my cake and eat it. Because the reader is unlikely to give this matter too much thought, the fate of Mrs Fryman comes as the surprise resolution to a question that nobody realised they should have been asking. (If you did in fact realise this, please forgive the generality of the statement.)

But that still leaves three characters unaccounted for. So... _maybe_ one of them was the teacher? But if I specify who, then it draws attention to the unresolved questions surrounding the other two. And it means another plot-significant family has been disrupted, which would need to be addressed and might seem repetitive following the business with the Frymans. In the end, I thought it best to leave the whole thing a bit vague. You'll notice I do this a lot.

As for _why_ the teacher was removed... perhaps they were a part of the conspiracy? Or maybe they were simply removed so Priyanka could have a position in the settlement. Again, I didn't decide on anything specific.

> I know, it's just... oh, it's all making me anxious.

This line was originally "oh, it's stressing me out." I decided this was too modern-sounding.

> "'You can't fault the Diamond Authority on efficiency.'" An incredulous pause. "What was that supposed to mean? What can you fault them on? Who talks like that to somebody they've just met?"

There's kind of an ambiguity in the story about how acceptable it is to criticise the gems. It's a bit strange that Doug considers this somehow shocking, but Lars is always badmouthing the Diamond Authority with basically zero consequences. I hope this is justified to some extent by the later suggestion that people wouldn't ordinarily say something like that directly to the peacekeeper.

> Mr Maheshwaran's nervous energy was apparently depleted, and he continued in a more measured tone. "I just think we should be very careful who we associate with until we know what's been going on in this settlement."

This conversation, and Connie's response to hearing it, is intended to set up the conflict/narrative tension that drives the first few chapters. It's sold as a mystery, but it's really an excuse for me to launch into several chapters of heavy exposition, punctuated by various characters briefly behaving in a manner that may or may not be suspicious. This may be a bit thin, but my primary goal at this point was to bring the reader up to speed on the rules of the setting.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 3](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/49790831).

> Chapter 3: Ancient History

Another chapter name that would be dull and bland, except I saved it by giving two of the other chapters similar names. This makes it part of a trilogy, and the reader is free to compare the chapters and search in vain for thematic links.

> She eyed her case, which was yet to be unpacked.

This is a last-minute amendment from "She eyed her still-unpacked case", which you will observe is entirely wrong.

> Her parents were in the kitchen preparing a breakfast of bread and cheese with some preserved fruit.

I should compile a list of all the meals Connie eats in this story. Then I could fold it up and throw it in a big bin.

> But I made you some eggs-in-bread to take if you like.

So, here's a thing. Why aren't they calling it a sandwich?

It's never specified exactly what year the gems took over, but I always think of it as being in the last third of the 18th century. So there's every possibility that this was a good number of years after the Earl of Sandwich gave his name to that particular snack. Still, it's hard to resist renaming a common item to establish an altered history, so I'm choosing to assume that even if the name had taken hold, it had not had time to spread throughout the English-speaking world.

> Connie was followed part of the way down the street by a chicken.

The layout of the settlement is meant to be essentially identical to Beach City, by the way. It doesn't need to be any smaller because Beach City already has a comically limited population. So this should conjure not the idea that they are living on a big farm, but a normal town that also has chickens running around.

> A cart passed her by on its way from the stables. The men in the back waved at her, and she raised a hand politely in response. They had axes and saws with them in the cart, and were likely going to cut wood.

I put no thought into the logic of forestry, beyond this fleeting acknowledgement. I don't know what area of land would be needed for sustainable firewood, etc. The first few chapters establish a society wholly reliant on agriculture, but I didn't want to get too bogged down in research on what was not the main thrust of the story.

> "Good morning. My name is Connie." _(Too formal?)_

Connie's thoughts are occasionally quoted directly in italics, but I can't help thinking this one ends up looking like I forgot to delete an author's note.

> Finally she approached the education centre. From a distance she could see a few kids outside. Some younger-looking children were running around playing some sort of game. Connie was relieved to note that their outfits all had a similar patchwork quality to hers.

Again, the line about the outfits was added late in the process to give the reader something to work with in visualising what the characters actually look like. The children are likely Onion's gang, on which more later.

> Plus, no offence to Mrs Lezner, but she is not up to teaching a mixed-age group.

Poor Mrs Lezner. She has done nothing to warrant the character assassination she receives in this story. Her only trait borrowed from (semi-)canon is that she is Connie's teacher; beyond this she is effectively an original character by stealth.

There's a certain hypocrisy at work in the next couple of chapters, because I am constantly baffled by the prevalence of stories where people take characters from interesting settings and transpose them to a school or college. (Not that I have any problem with people writing what they want, and indeed writing what they know.) Still, at the same time, I sometimes encounter mainstream fiction featuring school-age kids and wonder, what's going on for them at school? Why is it not depicted at all? It takes up such a large proportion of their lives! (Similarly, half of the episode running time of every sitcom should feature the main character sitting at a desk typing on a computer at work. No funny events happen.)

But the main reason for the education centre is to deliver a vast chunk of exposition. Should some of this have been left until later in the story for pacing reasons? Possibly. On the other hand, I didn't want information known to the characters to remain a secret to the audience. It seemed important to bring things up to speed so Connie's subsequent journey of discovery had an established context. And by delivering the information in a school setting, it establishes that this is not necessarily the complete truth, but how the characters understand the world. If I explained this backstory through narration, it could gain a false legitimacy.

> He shrugged. "Maybe Mrs Lezner just doesn't know much science."

There is no universal curriculum. The gems are not particularly bothered what is taught as long as it doesn't directly contradict their propaganda. Teachers are selected on their willingness to toe the line on this, so it's the luck of the draw in terms of their actual knowledge.

> It was not unheard of for people to be named after crops, although it struck Connie as rather old-fashioned.

One of my favourite things that I do in this story, because it is so nonsensical, is to appropriate details from the canon of the show, and then imply that they are _caused by_ the events in this timeline. A lot of this surrounds Onion. It makes a kind of sense that people could start to venerate food and name children after it, but... no explanation was required, since this is already his name.

> Most of the benches were empty, and it didn't seem like the classroom would be anything close to full even when the last few kids came in. This made sense, if they'd previously fit a whole second class into the room at the same time.

It's also a sign that the population has been reduced. I sometimes wonder if I laid this theme on a bit thick.

> "The answer is nineteen, Mrs Lezner," she answered after a pause.

A _division_ question where the answer is nineteen, and probably not a trivial one either. Have you ever looked at olden-time school textbooks? They don't mess about.

> So the lesson continued, until Mrs Lezner reached the end of the board and moved on to a spelling quiz.

In retrospect, I'm not sure how standardised spelling would be across settlements, and by extension whether it would be standardised at all. But let's leave that to one side.

> _Day and night we shall not rest_  
>  _Embodying our truest worth_  
>  _Fulfilling our sacred quest_  
>  _To bring Arcadia back to Earth._

Oof. Look, Steven Universe is a cartoon wherein the characters are always singing songs. So I needed to get a quick song in before we could all move on. It also serves to illustrate how a blind faith that Earth can be restored is interwoven into human culture. This song was written by Mrs Lezner, meaning it was written in character by me as just barely scanning. That is my excuse which I will be sticking with.

> "I... yes, but can I just say that that last bit was different to what I was taught? I thought the gems explained to the ancient humans not to worship them."

It is established early on in the lesson that the information contained therein is wholly unverifiable.

> wasting land on luxury crops that depleted soil nutrients...

This is intended to refer to things like tobacco, but I suppose it could also encompass plants grown for aesthetic purposes.

> But the short version is, you can't just keep growing crops on the same land. You need to let the land recover by leaving it to nature for at least a year.

I'm no expert on the science of crop rotation, but the intention was that it is taking much longer than it should for the fields to recover. Agricultural methods that were perfectly valid became ineffective as gem activity continued to damage the planet.

> PeeDee had his hand up. "And the gems knew about this?"

Almost everything PeeDee does in this chapter is in service of the main plot. He is trying to plant questions in Connie's head, so that when the time comes she might be more receptive to criticism of the Diamond Authority.

> Even though everything humans have ever needed can be found or grown on the land, our ancestors insisted on digging into the ground and mining for toxic metals and dirty fuels.

The gems require a monopoly on the resources under the ground, hence their warning humans away from them.

> After a minute, PeeDee noticed Connie's awkward hovering and introduced her to the other kids. She realised as he was finishing that she had failed to memorise any of their names.

Through a series of hand-waving statements like this, I will avoid assigning names or identities to any of the children who are not part of the show's main cast. Again: nobody has come here out of a desire to read about characters that I have invented.

> "Sometimes a Peridot comes here to make sure we're eating enough," the girl from the front row announced, then giggled. "I think she thinks humans are strange. She kept looking away when she was supposed to be checking my teeth."

This is very bad, because it violates the principle of show-don't-tell. But I thought it was a funny image and it didn't fit anywhere in the story, so I threw it in regardless. It's a bit redundant as the organic regulator removes any need for them to act as doctors, but I suppose it couldn't counteract the effects of malnutrition, so it's nice that they'd make sure the kids aren't being deprived. But it was mainly inspired by the question: do gems actually have teeth? They're visually coded as having teeth, but... why would they need teeth?

> Connie shuddered. "Yes. Gosh, I only saw them once. Those flying things? I walked out too far once when I was a little kid, but I was too scared to ever go back after those things yelled at me."

More telling instead of showing! In the middle of a chapter full of clunking exposition, too.

> Onion and the younger kids were already seated, it being entirely unclear how and when they had entered the building.

It's very likely that these are the same kids as in Onion Gang. But there's a problem with this. In the story a big deal is made of Onion being nonverbal, and how this could be a result of the gems' negative influence on his life. (Again, even though he's exactly the same way in the show. Connie doesn't know that, though, does she?) So if those other weird kids are introduced in any detail, it would detract from this as Onion would no longer seem unique in his dysfunctionality.

> So, two hundred and fifty years ago, the gems decided to save humanity.

I hope it goes without saying, but the gems knew very well that humans weren't to blame for the condition of the planet. They lied about it because that would make it easier to control the remaining humans.

I chose the late 18th century as the time of Pink Diamond's coup for a number of related reasons. Humanity was on the brink of a number of discoveries that, while not making them a real threat to the gems, could have been seen as undesirable. The first hints of the industrial revolution presaged a large increase in global trade. Discoveries surrounding electricity would have been recognised as the first step toward developing methods of instantaneous long-distance communication. A truly global human society would be in a position to get a real sense of how much damage had been done to Earth by the gems.

Perhaps Pink Diamond had other reasons as well. Maybe she really did hope to eliminate suffering. Maybe she just found pre-industrial societies easier to romanticise.

> They would have doomed everybody. So of course, as punishment, their names were wiped from history.

So it is no secret that historical details have been obscured, and this is in fact presented as a good thing.

> PeeDee put his hand up. "Mrs Lezner? If the gems were going to intervene no matter what, why did they even talk to the leaders?"

Again, PeeDee is making these interjections for Connie's benefit. Funnily enough, when the untruth of this history is later confirmed beyond doubt, most of the impact is absorbed by Connie's cognitive dissonance.

> They accepted Pink Diamond's offer unanimously. To be protected and watched over by the gems, until such time as the planet recovers.

Since the planet will never recover, this is a false representation. Connie struggles with a realisation of this over the next few chapters, perhaps not entirely unaffected by PeeDee's cynicism.

> The Diamond Authority carried out a census of every single human on the planet, fitting them with organic regulators and determining which areas needed to be evacuated.

The first fact I can tell you about the organic regulator is that I originally called it the gem implant. I was a good way through the first draft before I realised this was very much a first-draft name. 'Organic regulator' carries a neat double-meaning, in that in addition to regulating organic processes such as healing, it also regulates organics — that is, keeps humans under control.

It turned out to be pivotal to the story's resolution, but this was an emergent process. I initially wrote it in simply to answer the question of how the gems would control the population level. Also, in the Human Zoo, the residents were so carefully protected that being hurt was a fabled event. The gems could exert no such control in the settlement, so it seemed reasonable that Pink Diamond would want to deploy other measures to protect people from harm.

> Not many records survive from that period. It was a huge undertaking. The Diamond Authority carried out a census of every single human on the planet, fitting them with organic regulators and determining which areas needed to be evacuated. It's not surprising that a lot was lost in the upheaval.

There is another unanswered question hanging over all this: what actually happened in the first years of the occupation? A lot of effort was taken in the first couple of generations to ensure people were left with little idea of what life was really like before the gems. By controlling the movement of people, the gems also controlled the flow of information. So if anything untoward had taken place, they could easily ensure it was forgotten forever. Whether gems committed atrocities against humans is left up to the reader. I don't have an answer.

> When an elderly resident had passed away in settlement P5T7, some gems had attended the funeral service, and after waiting at a respectful distance for the speeches to end, had solemnly conveyed the body away.

This detail was improvised in the moment, and isn't really necessary for the setting to work, but it's a nicely disconcerting concept.

> She had an idea PeeDee was making fun of the teacher, without being so overt as to amuse anybody but himself. (...) As if he felt there was nothing Mrs Lezner could teach him that he didn't already know — hadn't he implied as much this morning? So were these rhetorical questions? And if so, in service of what point?

As mentioned previously, Connie's own presence is the point of asking these questions.

> She glanced at the portrait of Pink Diamond, guilty.

When in doubt, have Connie look at the painting of Pink Diamond.

> Following the other children outside, Connie paused to let out a yawn that felt like it would never end, and hoped the meal her dad had packed would give her sufficient energy to make it through the afternoon.

This is another contrived chapter break. Chapters 3 and 4 make up a full day, and I had to pick a point at which to split it up. We're halfway through the day and more than halfway through the word count, so it pretty much had to be here. But really, what is this? Wondering if she'll be too tired in the afternoon? Is this the dramatic cliffhanger that's going to keep the audience hooked? (It's not even the worst chapter break in the story.)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 4](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/50034836).

> Chapter 4: On The Folly Of Insects

Now _there's_ a title. Even if the capitalisation is inconsistent with the story title...

> "I look forward to hearing about your journey here! Anything we can learn about the world outside the settlement is precious information. Plus, anything you've learned about farming and production techniques in your previous home could supplement our knowledge here. The resettlement of humans is our best chance to consolidate our accumulated wisdom, and this represents a valuable opportunity!"

People might bring in books, recipes, songs, all kinds of stuff. Without the occasional influx of people, there is a risk of cultural stagnation.

> Connie was indignant. "What? How on earth is that my fault?"

Despite this superficially negative first reaction, from here on out Connie takes the place of Steven in her attitude toward Lars. She is somewhat in awe of his devil-may-care attitude, and disregards his obvious antipathy toward her. She also over-interprets his relationship to Sadie.

> But there isn't anything interesting out there, anyway, it's just dirt and rocks.

The Prime Kindergarten isn't actually that far from B1C7 (it's a relatively short train ride from Beach City), and it's probably expanded over the millennia. So there may still be parts of Earth that aren't quite as barren as this.

> Me, my mom always insists on packing me a lunch so if the weather's nice I usually go to the shore to eat.

Obvious reference to Barbara's equivalent behaviour in the show.

> Ronaldo laughed heartily at a nonexistent joke as he contrived his way back into the conversation.

He exhibited similar behaviour in the episode Rocknaldo.

> "Ronaldo!" PeeDee interrupted, glaring at his brother. "Don't rush Connie! She's only just got here. There'll be plenty of time for showing her round." He gestured meaningfully at Connie. "Don't you think she'd rather take it easy just now?"
> 
> Ronaldo's face had frozen in an inscrutable expression. Eventually he spoke in a measured, calm tone. "Yes. You are correct. Thank you for your insight."

Ronaldo is too eager to bring Connie into their world, and PeeDee has to actively remind him to slow things down. They're anxious to get her on their side, but first they need to get the measure of her.

> "There's a foundry with all the right equipment. But there's not currently anyone here who knows how to use it. The guy who used to do it got moved on."

It's not detailed overtly, but I had an idea there would have been a general skill drain in the settlement. At first it was useful to have some craftspeople to modernise buildings, create the windmill and generally improve living conditions. But there would come a point when the gems didn't want too much ingenuity concentrated in one place. People with knowledge and skills could be swiftly removed before they had time to pass them on.

> Same with graduating. You can opt in to take a test whenever you like. Most kids wait though, because it's easier to stay in education than start working full-time.

Although the concept of children is alien to the gems, Pink Diamond gained enough knowledge about humans to decide there was something distasteful about child labour. Because of this, they can't be compelled to work in the common fields. However, parents have the final say in their own homes.

> Connie smiled conspiratorially. "Don't you worry about me. I wouldn't do anything to keep you from your betrothed."

This is equivalent to when Steven had somehow convinced himself that Lars and Sadie were married.

> She remembered something she'd been taught when she was a little girl: Pink Diamond loved all humans. No matter what you did, Pink Diamond would still love you.

This is a tad unsubtle. _Has anyone noticed it's a bit like a religion_

> You looked after the bees, and in return they pollinated crops and provided the settlement with honey and wax.

Raising the question, of course, of what the gems gain from keeping humanity around. Pink Diamond wanted to protect organic life for its own sake, but how did she persuade the others? This innocuous statement trails the final reveal of the story.

> If a bee stung you, did you hate the bee? No, the pain lasted only a couple of minutes, and you would lament the poor insect as it perished as a result of its misguided action.

Another casual confirmation that physical injuries are swiftly healed, apparently counteracting venom as well.

> (Connie briefly wondered where they got the chalk from.)

Whenever a character wonders about something like this, it means I realised it was a plot hole, and hoped I could get away with it by briefly acknowledging it and moving on. Maybe they have a big stash of chalk from the old days. Blackboard chalk isn't even really chalk, anyway.

> _Classroom Songs_ and _Sonatas no. 31-40_ were at the top of the pile.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced 18 numbered piano sonatas in his lifetime. Ludwig van Beethoven produced 32. (They did write additional solo piano pieces.)

> She looked up to where Pink Diamond's artistically-rendered eyes failed to quite meet hers. A dust-filmed plaque at the bottom of the frame bore the title, 'Our Benefactor'.

Overt Half-Life 2 reference. The Combine are known in propaganda as 'our benefactors'.

> At the back of the room was another door, presumably also locked.

This is never explored, but it's not meant to be an important mystery or anything. It's probably a staff room or office.

> At one end were some antique-looking volumes: _The Pilgrim's Progress, A Journal of the Plague Year, The Female American_...

It was interesting to look into pre-19th century literature. It wasn't necessarily a reason for writing it that way in the first place, but the timing of Pink Diamond's coup creates a cultural disconnect which is worth exploring. We don't remember a vast proportion of 19th century fiction, but the stuff we do remember is so ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine it not being there. They don't even have Sherlock Holmes! In fact, they don't really have any detective stories. Maybe this is why Connie is such a bad detective?

> "Some of them are duplicates of older books, the popular ones don't last forever. That's where the typesetting machine comes in." She indicated the machine on the desk, which featured a row of vertically-aligned discs, two rows of buttons resembling organ stops, and three differently-sized levers jutting out to the right. Connie could only begin to imagine how it worked.

The typesetting machine was originally the typing machine, but 'typing' felt too convergent with our own world. Such a device is tolerated by the gems, as they aren't too interested in censoring books (with certain exceptions.)

> On the bright side, nobody's been Choosened here for a while so maybe there's a chance we can graduate to the senior grade before we die of old age.

Have I not mentioned in a while that the population is getting smaller?

> Well, that's admirably civic-minded of you.

This is a phrase that crops up a lot. It's a bit of an allusion to the Orwellian announcements in Half-Life 2, where the police were 'civil protection' and spoke of 'anti-civil activity' and so forth. Here we have a civic hall, and helping the settlement is considered civic-minded. It's 20% different, but 80% the same.

> "Oh, yeah, I guess my brother still wants to show you around soon. But it looks like they're still in class. Plus you seem pretty tired, so there's no hurry."

PeeDee will spend some time avoiding inviting Connie to the manufactory, while trying to make it look like he's not avoiding it.

> Traditionally peas are meant to be good for the land, but I guess there's been some debate about it.

Legumes are indeed helpful for nitrogen fixation as part of a system of crop rotation. So, either this knowledge has been lost over the years, or it is no longer applicable. Really this is just me showing off that I've done almost two minutes' research on the internet.

> "Sit up straight, Connie," Priyanka scolded. "It's rude to put your head on the table."

This is a reference to the Fusion Cuisine episode. Connie's parents telling her off for putting her head on the table is a constant across all timelines and universes. (As an aside, I think "What is this _thing_ that you brought to dinner?" may be my favourite line in the series.)

> Once every four days.

Originally Doug was going to meet Zircon every eight days, but I decided this was insufficient given the situation. The main thing was that it should completely disregard any concept of the seven-day week. Characters never mention what day, month or year it is, and it's not that they don't know, but they've taken a cue from the gems that the human calendar isn't all that significant. In particular, there's no indication that school follows a weekly schedule. Instead, days off are planned around the other work requirements of the settlement.

> This didn't seem like a very satisfying answer. Wasn't settlement P5T7 struggling? What use had their civic leader been other than as an overseer of its gradual decline? Connie felt guilty for doubting her mother's logic, and kept the thought to herself. Perhaps it was a concept to revisit when she wasn't half-asleep.

PeeDee was trying to prompt Connie to question things, but if there's a line of cause-and-effect between that and her actually doing so, it's a very fuzzy one. I think it's more the case that the general upheaval of moving brings about situations that prod at the insular bubble she's been living in until now. Access to books, exposure to different attitudes, and experience of being affected by the system. Plus, even though teenagers are a modern cultural invention, it's not unnatural that she'd start to question authority at her age.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 5](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/50276186).

> Chapter 5: Digging

In which Connie and the Frymans do some digging, and then she goes to the bakery and ends up digging a hole for herself.

> As if in response, there was the muffled sound of a handbell outside. "Sounds like that's our team," Doug said, standing up.

With this brief description, the reader is left to fill in all kinds of details about how the work is organised. There are a couple of scenes that establish bits of info about the day-to-day agricultural work, but I didn't want to get too shackled to it.

> They were lucky the residents deigned to feed them, and she couldn't help seeing a parallel with the gems' oversight of humanity. "You should be glad we like eggs," she told an uninterested hen.

This is another attempt to raise questions in the reader's mind as to whether and how the gems benefit from letting the humans live.

> "Yes, thanks. I didn't know you two worked here!"
> 
> "Oh, we don't really," Sadie explained. "Not usually. It's run by Lars's parents."

His parents are designated as bakers, purely so we can have scenes that parallel Lars's canon job in the doughnut shop. I hope they didn't mind.

> "They could easily have stayed here and I could still be in bed, but everyone's so desperate to see how those stupid peas are doing."

This establishes the relatively insignificant detail that people doing work of particular importance to the community can be exempt from general fieldwork.

> It was for Mr DeMayo, but if he doesn't want to show up on time then that's his problem, he can wait for the next one.

The sharp reader will intuit that this is Greg before it is explicitly stated in a couple of chapters' time.

> We had a bunch of Jaspers come down with a Zircon, and the Zircon had them going into houses and looking around. I've no idea what they were looking for or if they found it, but next thing we knew, the teacher and peacekeeper were being told to pack their things and that was it.

Presumably they realised Mrs Fryman had been stringing them along with a sham investigation, so they swooped in to search her and any suspected associates. Not having found the hiding place, all they could achieve was to make an example of her. And the teacher, for some reason.

> My mom knows Mr Dewey and he won't even tell her what was going on, so, uh, yeah, not sure.

It's entirely possible that Mr Dewey doesn't possess the information to tell Barbara even if he wanted to. (Unless Mrs Fryman brought him in on the conspiracy, which I kind of doubt.) The hunt for Amethyst is happening in secret, and there would be no reason for the gems to brief the civic leader on it.

By the way: in common with Steven, Connie has failed to join the dots and realise Sadie is Barbara's daughter.

> Of course she couldn't trick Lars, the boy who thought so little of the gems' authority that he had defied the settlement border.

Connie has some cognitive dissonance about this. She still believes it's wrong to defy the gems, but she's in awe of Lars for having done so.

> Who was 'they', anyway?

_10/10 grammar_

> She leafed through _A Journal of the Plague Year_ in horrified fascination.

I stumbled upon this when I was looking up books to cite, and it turned out to be quite useful for the story. One of the pre-19th century books that's still remembered is _Robinson Crusoe_. However, I deliberately left this one out, because the whole point was that the library wouldn't consist of our greatest-hits version of the 18th century. It'd just be a random collection of books, some of which are mostly forgotten. But through _Robinson Crusoe_ I found that Daniel Defoe also wrote this fictionalised account of the Plague of London.

> However, there was something strange about the way that it was written. Most prominently, the prose kept abruptly shifting from past to present tense and back with no discernible justification.

Not only is fan fiction a constant across timelines, _badly-written_ fan fiction is a constant across timelines. The fact that I felt the need to include this detail speaks to a certain insecurity, I think.

> _The Adventures of Millicent Among the Gems_ showed more promise. The actual premise of the story seemed rather contrived — the titular Millicent lost both of her parents in a tragic accident, and instead of being taken in by a neighbour as one might expect, she was selected by the gems to join the court of Pink Diamond. An unlikely scenario indeed, but it was the jumping-off point for an imaginative tour of gem society. It was, of course, sheer speculation, and bore more than a passing resemblance to descriptions of ancient human civilisations. Still, it was undeniably entertaining, not to mention better written than the Gulliver book.

Hey, _I'd_ read it! Its quality is attested to by the fact that there is more than one copy in the settlement. This paragraph also confirms that nobody really knows anything about gem society. The Maheshwarans' journey in chapter 1 represents as much as anyone would ever see of the world beyond the settlements.

> "We were wondering if you'd like to come and have that tour of our manufactory!" Ronaldo blurted.

This is a bit questionable. It doesn't make sense to ask that unless they already knew she'd say no, but how could they have known she'd be too busy? Maybe Ronaldo simply cannot be restrained from inviting people, and they would have limited the first visit to a tour of the kitchen.

> "The soil here seems different to where I came from," she remarked. "The ground in settlement P5T7 was always quite dry, even when it rained."
> 
> "That sounds a bit like the soil in the outer fields," Ronaldo replied.

I really struggled, as time went on, to write scenes of dialogue where the characters aren't just banging on about food and soil quality all the time. There should be a sort of Bechdel test for this. Anyway, this marks the first indication that any of the characters are consciously aware of the decline in arability.

> "Gosh," said Connie. "What kind of experiments?"
> 
> He narrowed his eyes. "I'm not sure whether I know you well enough to go into that."
> 
> "Um... right." More odd behaviour. Would everybody she met eventually start acting like they had something to hide?

I labelled this as a mystery story, but it's not really, not in a 'whodunit' sense. It's a mystery in the sense that Connie doesn't know what's going on, and then she finds out. She doesn't deduce anything (well, maybe she does, but not about the initial question of what's going on.) The people hiding the truth simply choose to tell her about it. So you're not meant to think "ah, how clever, if I'd only paid more attention I could have figured it out myself." But if you were meant to think that, this is the bit you'd be thinking it about.

As is more or less directly stated here, I simply made most of the characters behave in a generically suspicious manner for the first third of the story, to ramp up Connie's paranoia.

> "Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. We brought you these." He thrust a translucent paper bag at Connie. "Potato slivers."
> 
> She accepted the proffered bag and examined its contents: paper-thin slices of fried potato. She picked one out to try, and found it surprisingly crunchy.

It is my belief that, given sufficient time, every culture will independently invent crisps.

This wasn't a random social call. The Fryman boys helped Connie out and gave her some food because she represents their best chance of access to the peacekeeper, and they want her to feel kindly-disposed toward them.

> Priyanka's expression darkened. "It's still hoarding when it's your own share, Connie. I wish you'd remember that. You have to have a proper lunch."

The taboo against hoarding food is also for people's protection. If someone got it into their head that they could help avoid needing a subsidy by saving their food for winter instead of eating it, they could do themselves harm.

> Vidalia gave an extravagant shrug. "A little weaving, a little painting. Nothing so useful it'd get me off farming duties. My husband, Yellowtail, he's a fisherman. A fisherman! Do you know the fish just wash up on the beach here? So naturally he feels a little out of place. Still, we should be grateful. If he hadn't been moved here, we'd never have met and I'd never have been blessed with Onion."

It wasn't that I set out to write Sour Cream out of the continuity, it was just the natural consequence of the rules I had established thus far.

> "They're good boys," Vidalia said, momentarily solemn. "Nobody begrudges Mr Fryman that. For a long time I assumed it was down to who you know, but... whoo, Greg!"

Vidalia is distracted before she can signal quite a significant reveal. She assumed Mr Fryman was at an advantage because his wife was the peacekeeper, and therefore had an in with the Diamond Authority. When Mrs Fryman was summarily exiled from the settlement, Vidalia revised this opinion.

> Kiki gave a smile so broad it forced her eyes closed. "Just normal fish! Don't worry, it was brought in fresh this morning."

Connie's conversation with Kiki wasn't in the first draft, but I worried the party scene was too short. This brief interaction was all I could come up with to flesh it out. Still, it gave me an opportunity to showcase the simplistic categorisation of fish as being either normal or strange. This isn't important for worldbuilding, but I find it amusing.

> The cacophony of voices was starting to bear down on her, as she remembered that this was more people than she'd ever seen in one room before. Come to that, it might be more people than she'd ever met before. She glanced nervously at the various people in conversation, trying to intuit some furtive tone, some conspiratorial laugh. Vidalia caught her eye and raised a glass, winking. The overlapping voices crescendoed in Connie's ears.

I believe it is consistent with Connie's character to become anxious in this situation.

> Her mind made up, she found her mother in belaboured conversation with a man with an eyepatch, and gently tugged on her sleeve.

It was only later that I realised this cameo by Suitcase Sam was inconsistent with the logic of the setting, hence the explanation in chapter 15.

> She returned to her conversation as Connie made her way out past her dad, who was singing along more or less tunelessly to a song about apples.

Specifically, the song from Kate Micucci's fantasy sequence in the Garfunkel & Oates TV series.

There's a bit of an ambiguity here. A song about apples could be alluding to cider, so maybe they are celebrating getting drunk on booze? However, I did wonder whether a side-effect of the organic regulator would be to counteract the effects of alcohol, since it is effectively a poison that must be metabolised by the liver. So perhaps they really are just happy about apples.

> The low ebb of the water revealed stranded seaweed, which streaked the sand black in the half-light.

I think at one point this sentence referred to the ocean being at low tide. I was careful to remove this reference. (There are no regular tides.)

> Buck shrugged. "Usually I would, but there's value in breaking your routines. That's what I was explaining to PeeDee. But it's a message you have to be ready to listen to." He stared at Connie. "You have the advantage of me," he added, in the same calm tone.

So... what's going on with Buck? Why is he creepy and weird?

The main difference with Buck in this timeline is that he doesn't have sunglasses. This lack of a visual barrier makes his self-confidence come across as overly intense. I know this is silly, but it was the jumping-off point for his characterisation. He's also caught up in a different social dynamic due to the absence of Sour Cream, and the way people perceive him in the show relies on a lot of cultural context that just hasn't come about in this world. Basically, a variety of small factors make him seem out of place in this timeline and Connie doesn't know what to make of him.

> "My name's Connie," she replied, and to her relief he broke eye contact and resumed staring off into the middle-distance.

See, he keeps staring people out. It's off-putting.

> As she entered the house, a weariness overtook her, and sleep came quickly. She did not hear her parents' return.

Everything up to here in the draft was written largely improvisationally, within the parameters of the setting I wanted to establish. It was only at this point that it dawned on me that if I ever wanted to get to the point, I couldn't continue detailing every single moment of Connie's life. (Maybe this should have been obvious.)

Whenever I read a work of extended fiction, I pay little to no attention to the timeline of events. I suspect it's one of those things you notice only if it doesn't make sense. The chronological structure of this story is as follows: there are three consecutive days, then an interval, then five more days, then another interval, and a final two days. We have reached the end of the first three days, coasting on the fumes of the alleged conflict introduced at the end of day one.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 6](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/50518349).

Ha ha, chapters 6 and 7. This interim period was originally a little under 6000 words. "That's a bit long," I thought, "I'll split it in two and have two short chapters instead of one long one. I'll just write a bit extra in each of the chapters so they're not too short." There are two obvious problems with this: it's hard to come up with new scenes to shoehorn in on a deadline, and doing so only pushes the real plot events even further back.

Unfortunately, the pacing issue here is baked into the structure of the story. The next plot development is that PeeDee and Ronaldo try to bring Connie in on their conspiracy. This is _insanely_ risky from their perspective. For them to do it within the first few days of her arrival would be reckless even by Ronaldo's standards. They need to keep an eye on Connie and get to know her first, to try and guess which way she'd jump. I think if I'd just stated that several weeks had passed and moved on, it would feel a bit hollow. We know what it's like to move to the settlement, but we should have a bit about what it's like to actually live there before we heave everything up all over again.

What I should probably have done was culled some material. But surely fan fiction should take the form of demented outsider art, free from editors and publishers and critics? Pioneering experiments in narrative structure!

In the end, I compromised with myself by releasing both chapters in the same week. (In other words, I lost my nerve.)

> Chapter 6: Subversive Activity

I went back and forth on names for these two chapters. I was going to call one of them 'Pushing Boundaries', until I realised this would have been an applicable title for either or both of them. (Jenny pushing things in the classroom, Onion pushing the limits of mischief, Connie testing the boundaries of the settlement and of polite conversation.) As a title, 'Subversive Activity' is a transparent attempt to make you read more into the characters' behaviour than is really there.

> School did not follow a strict schedule, but tended to start between nine and ten in the morning, and end comfortably before three in the afternoon.

Intended to be emblematic of the general lack of oversight or importance attributed to schooling, which is left up to the whims of the individual teacher.

> The other was part of some sort of map that had been cut up into sheets. It looked like it might have been a plan of the fields, but all that was on this page was a solid line passing diagonally through a few intersecting dotted lines.

This is the vestigial remnant of a long-abandoned plot thread, from when I was initially going through ideas of what this story might be. I thought at one point that one of the secrets Ronaldo might be hiding was a map proving that there really had once been other settlements in the area, accessible on foot without violating the boundary. This would have been their proof that the area of farmable land had shrunk significantly. The idea was that these maps had been destroyed and re-used as scrap paper, and Ronaldo had collected enough to piece one back together.

I ultimately abandoned this concept because I couldn't see any realistic way that this could have passed from the cultural memory of the settlement, no matter how many people were moved in and out. The previous existence of the vanished settlements would surely still be common knowledge. Also, if the civic administration censored these maps (and why are they doing this in the first place?) it would be obviously counterproductive to then hand the pieces out to children. The map fragment on the back of Connie's paper serves as a silent and ultimately incomprehensible memorial to this failed idea.

> "Wouldn't people get ill, though? What if there was an outbreak of disease? I mean... there could be diseases all around us right now, and we just wouldn't know about it."

It is commonly understood that if people live according to the gems' instructions, eventually the planet will recover and things will go back to how they were before. Here, Connie is beginning to grapple with the realisation that this might not actually be practical. It's her first tentative step toward questioning the doctrine that's been drummed into her throughout her childhood.

If she'd really thought about it before, she could already have reached the conclusion that humans are by now reliant on the organic regulator for their continued survival. She was in possession of all the relevant information. But it's coming here and being exposed to new ideas, attitudes and literature that has pointed her in the direction of this contradiction in the Authority's message.

> At the next opportunity, Connie returned _A Journal of the Plague Year_ to the library, and hoped that her next check-out wouldn't give rise to such uncomfortable questions. Perhaps, she reasoned, there would be some contingency in place for when humanity achieved independence. Still, it seemed hard to dispute that they were at a disadvantage.

Before long, Connie has rationalised her doubts away. For now.

The entire scene beginning with this paragraph was added at the last minute to make the chapter a bit longer, and to give a bit more weight to Buck as a red herring.

> "I was hoping to find... The Adventures of Gulliver? Or something like that. I'm afraid I don't know if that's the actual title."

Also, to retroactively insert a couple of mentions of Connie searching for _Gulliver's Travels_ , as I didn't know at this point in the first draft that I'd end up making a bigger deal of it.

> Connie tried her best to decode this statement. Perhaps Buck Dewey knew the location of a secret book?

I had the idea, somewhat too late, that maybe the Dewey family possesses this timeline's version of Buddy Buddwick's journal, with whatever secrets about the gems it might contain. This could tie into the fact that Buck often seems to act like he has his own agenda. This is one of two scenes added late in the writing process that hint toward this in a way that no reader could reasonably be expected to understand. My only hope is that, by writing with undeveloped concepts like this in mind, the world can be given an illusion of depth.

> "This is the centre of the settlement," he asserted. "Not geographically, but in a truer sense. You can learn a lot by waiting in a place like this."

Buck has independently invented psychogeography.

> "I don't have any interesting books," Buck replied, smiling as if at a private joke.

See? He totally has Buddy's book. It's the only possible interpretation.

> "I've had to improvise over the years," Vidalia explained, "in terms of pigments. It's a case of whatever you can lay your hands on."

This is my way of saying that I am not prepared to research the manufacture of pigments in pre-industrial societies.

> She gazed at a depiction of a bearded man astride a winged unicorn, trying to make sense of it.

The pegasus-unicorn is the most fabled and valuable of all non-existent animals. If you see one, good luck will follow you for the next three business days.

The man in the painting is Greg.

> The painting showed a boat on a lake, the peaceful landscape beyond reflected beneath it with only a subtle distortion.

I added the bit about this painting as I was concerned the scene was a bit short. Also, I think at one point I didn't know whether it was all oceans that were dangerous, or just the ocean around Beach City. So I decided to clarify that Yellowtail only used to sail on a lake. I'm not sure whether this diminishes the logic of his portrayal in the story. Are lake-sailors really as married to the lake as regular sailors are to the sea?

> "Gems like art and music just as much as we do. So we're not as different as some might have you believe."

I thought this was worth exploring, in a setting where the two species occupy the same planet. Gems have a different set of physiological needs (or lack thereof), so people would be eager to seize on a point of common ground in order to believe that their rulers aren't really so different.

The show seems to imply that it's only the top caste of gems that have access to art, since Peridot didn't even know what music was. But Vidalia needn't know this.

> "That wouldn't have been a place with cultural significance. I don't know where they show their art. But I know they take an interest. Sometimes they accept submissions from the settlement. Music, pictures, that sort of thing. Usually portraits of Pink Diamond. I think your teacher gave them one of her compositions once."

This is important, because it eventually becomes very relevant that Pink Diamond is soliciting art from the humans. If Mrs Lezner were a better composer, she might find herself living forever on a moon.

I didn't go into this in the story, but I have an idea that the overall quality of art is in stagnation due to everyone working in isolation, unable to inspire and influence each other. Possibly Pink Diamond would be coming to realise that she needs to get the humans out of the settlements and into their new habitat for an integrated artistic community to re-emerge.

> The boy was floating in the night sky, and looked like he was being struck by several types of lightning.

This timeline's equivalent of the painting in the secret room in Onion Friend.

> She was wondering by now whether she should have asked more about the painting Vidalia had rejected as unsuitable, but the moment seemed to have passed.

I added this sentence so it's not quite as out of the blue when this crops up again in chapter 9.

> One day, so the story went, somebody noticed the number 13 had been painted on the henhouse.

This entire sequence is directly plagiarised from the tedious middle section of _A Study In Scarlet_. Luckily for Onion, that book was never written in this timeline, so nobody knows he copied it.

> The peacekeeper intended to conscript a posse to patrol the area overnight, but the campaign had been cunningly scheduled to coincide with a busy harvest, and people weren't in the mood for staying up all night. Still, she valiantly commandeered a room in a nearby house which overlooked the henhouse, vowing to catch the miscreants in the act.

Of course, this was in fact Mrs Fryman. A rare glimpse of her work that didn't involve protecting a gem fugitive.

> ...until the following day, when a childish painting of a chicken was daubed on the side wall, sitting on what was not a zero but an egg.

Would you believe the punchline to this sequence didn't occur to me until I was actually writing it? It was just going to end without any point whatsoever.

> "If I revealed details of our suspicions, that could compromise your investigation by introducing a bias. The reports have to come from you. Plus, I need to know you're not just telling us what we want to hear."

After the fiasco with Mrs Fryman, Zircon is worried about anyone else discovering Amethyst and being turned against the Diamond Authority. To avoid this, she wants Doug to lead her to Amethyst without actually knowing what he's looking for. It's safe to say that this completely undermines any investigation he might have been able to carry out, and he is essentially reduced to uninformed guesswork.

> And secondly, the gems didn't even trust their own appointees in the civic administration.

They already had the peacekeeper and (maybe) one of the teachers turn against them. They couldn't prove anything against anyone else, but that doesn't mean they're going to trust them. Basically everyone in the settlement is tarnished with guilt by association, and Zircon required a complete outsider to continue the investigation on her behalf.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 7](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/50598053).

> Chapter 7: Wrong Notes

A pessimistic title to accompany Connie's failure to make any real headway in her own investigation.

> Although Connie remained on amiable enough terms with some of the other children in her class, she couldn't shake the idea that they were keeping her at arm's length.

Should it be amiable, or amicable? Answers on a postcard, please.

In-canon, Connie struggles to make friends due to moving around so much. So without a Steven in the settlement, she has difficulty fitting in.

> ("Is your first name short for something?" she had asked.
> 
> "Yes," he had replied, in a flat tone which did not invite any follow-up questions. He hadn't spoken to her for the rest of the day.)

This raises so many questions and possibilities. There's a popular theory that Peedee's name hinted at the existence of Pink Diamond. I have stylised it throughout as PeeDee, to confirm that in this case they are definitely initials. So, is it possible that in this timeline he is actually named after Pink Diamond?

It's not unprecedented. In our own timeline, girls in the USSR were named after Marx and Engels. As gems are technically genderless anyway, it's perhaps not beyond belief that some parents might choose to venerate their ruler in this way. If this is indeed the case with the Frymans, it would seem to point to one of two possibilities. Either they were once fanatical devotees of the Diamond Authority, and their worldview was shattered when they heard what Amethyst had to say. Or, since we don't know how long Amethyst has been in the settlement, it could also be that Mrs Fryman was protecting her since before PeeDee's birth, and named him after Pink Diamond purely as a calculated move to make herself appear more loyal.

> She'd first done her best to get the layout of the streets, and later ventured up the hill at the end of the peninsula, which in addition to containing the windmill, was fenced off as a pasture for goats.

I had to add in a couple of mentions of the goats, whose existence I had decided on later in the draft. Goats are one of the more efficient forms of livestock to keep. Another is rabbits, but you don't want them wandering everywhere and getting in the allotments. Admittedly the same is true of the goats, but they're probably easier to fence in and keep track of.

> Rainclouds had recently blown through, and the grassy edges of the track were gently yielding underfoot. In the field, she could see cobs of maize spotted and streaked where dust had clung to the drying rain. She flashed back to a tedious evening spent helping to wash the powdery residue from pea pods, which of course had to be used in addition to their contents.

Another bit which wasn't in the first draft. Just some imagery to chronicle the condition of the topsoil. I read _The Grapes Of Wrath_ in its entirety to research this short paragraph (note: this may not be entirely true.)

> Before long, Connie saw what she had been waiting for. A small triangular shape was visible in the distance, silently approaching in midair. It gradually resolved into a conical device of an unknown metal, which hovered a few feet off the ground and stared at her with an unblinking eye on its base.

I thought I should redeem myself by actually showing this. It's just dawned on me that flying robot drones keeping the population in check is in fact quite reminiscent of Half-Life 2, but the work was done for me on this one.

> "The ground may be unstable and there are other hazards which pose a danger to your fragile human body. Please remain in your settlement where you will be kept safe."

Bearing in mind that the gems aim to excavate and ultimately hollow out the planet, there may indeed be hazardous ground outside the settlements.

> On her way back, Connie saw the adults at work in one of the fields, reaping and sheafing wheat.

Really, this is the only scene where actual agriculture is taking place. Similarly, the original cartoon features a very low proportion of scenes of Greg actually running the car wash.

> A young man approached from the field clumsily brandishing some scythes. "Thanks, Jamie," Greg said, climbing into the back of the cart to help load them up. "Have you seen either of the Maheshwarans out there? Can you let them know I'm dropping their daughter off at the settlement?"

I don't know whether this was really necessary, but since they don't have the common connection of Steven, I didn't want it to seem in any way odd that Greg is driving Connie around for chats. For this reason, I took a moment to establish that everyone is on the same page about it.

> "Did... were the harvests better? Back then?"
> 
> "Sometimes," he admitted. "But there used to be more people back then, too. You've maybe noticed some of the houses aren't occupied now? So it all works out the same. I guess the gems know what they're doing."
> 
> "I guess they do," Connie blandly agreed.

This is hardly subtle, is it?

> "But there's nothing else out there. It's best to stay here, and make the best of things. So... best not go walking too far, would be my advice."

When living in confinement, you learn to suppress thoughts of freedom for the sake of your own mental health.

> "They say Pink Diamond has a real affinity with humans. Maybe she... maybe if she visited the settlements herself she'd understand..."
> 
> "Who's to say she doesn't?" Connie pointed out. "Visit, that is. There must be lots of settlements, she couldn't go everywhere."

I sort of envisioned Pink Diamond as remaining in her tower during the era when the story takes place, but I suppose that needn't necessarily be the case. Going by events in the show, the divergence from the alpha timeline must be after her original excursion in the guise of a Rose Quartz. Whether she would have taken that form in subsequent visits is unclear. Given that the plan for the colonisation of Earth was so drastically altered, it could have given her the excuse to visit humanity as herself. I have an idea that she would have visited Earth's various ruling classes, in person or through ambassadors, to gain information about the state of human culture and technology. The goal would have been to source talented artists, while refining the plans for ultimately deposing humanity's leaders.

(None of this made it into the story, because none of the characters in the settlement would have known anything about it in the first place.)

Once humanity is confined to the settlements, there's less justification for Pink to visit in person, as there's now a whole hierarchy of gems assigned to the management of humanity.

> Still, we humans aren't so bad, when we put our minds to it. We gotta stick together, right?

Once again, Greg and Connie form an alliance based on their shared humanity.

> "You're a budding musician, I've heard?" Greg enquired.

I added this whole musical discussion shortly before publication, as the conversation felt a bit slight overall.

> It's not about having all the notes, it's more about having the right ones. I prefer to have the next chord right where I need it, not just set out in a neat alphabetical order.

I lack the requisite musical theory to understand why standard guitar tuning works the way it does, but I am pleased by the intuitive nature of such chord changes as (for example) A to C. You only have to change one note — which is also true on the piano, but the linear nature of the keyboard makes it less obvious to me. Anyway, my hope is that this works as a strained metaphor for the shift in behaviour required of Connie.

> "Connie was out walking and ended up by the south wheat field," Greg explained. "You know, where we were working."

Vidalia was the one who didn't turn up to help. She never states it outright, but she has succumbed to the philosophy that there's not much point working too hard on the land, since failure seems inevitable either way. Several residents have developed a healthy cynicism toward the pantomime of trying to salvage the Earth.

> Vidalia was dismissive. "I'm sure you all managed just fine. It's not like we'll starve, anyway. No," she announced, "I just came to talk about your contribution to the festival."
> 
> Greg glanced at Connie, looking slightly pained. "Eh, it was nice catching up with you, Connie, but I'd better let you get on. Take it easy, won't you?"

Since Vidalia's suspicious behaviour is a red herring, why is she really at the barn? Suffice it to say, this is as close as I get to examining the ramifications of a world with no diseases or unwanted pregnancies. Draw your own inferences.

> "We've got a few of them," Mrs Lezner said. "These are actually published by the gems. To be perfectly honest, they're mostly a bit beyond me."
> 
> They proved to be beyond Connie as well, especially the higher-numbered ones — full of confusing time signatures and seemingly chaotic melodies. She'd tried picking out just the right-hand notes to try and make some sense out of them, and had the vague sense that the discordance might resolve itself if it was played correctly. But the whole piece was so counterintuitive that it could take months, years of practice.

Given centuries of practice, Mozart has branched into various musical experiments.

> Connie flipped absently through the book of sonatas, picking out a strangely atonal motif which repeated through one of the pieces. A, B, up to E, back down to F, and then the adjacent E. It repeated like a mantra through the composition.

This is very obscure and I didn't seriously expect anyone to get it. If, instead of looping back to A, you continue naming the notes above G alphabetically, then the sequence described here spells out HILFE. This is based on the fact that German musical notation includes H. Except it doesn't actually work, because I forgot that H is the equivalent of B, not A. If I could have come up with a code that actually worked, I assure you I would have used that instead.

> Point four. There was something indefinably strange about Buck Dewey. Connie couldn't shake the idea that he either knew something that she didn't, or was making fun of her.
> 
> Point five. Onion was even stranger, and she had noticed him often enough in unusual places that she suspected he might be following her around.

Throughout, I wanted to convey the impression that the other characters have their own agendas and inner lives, even if the details aren't all revealed. I'm not sure how successful I was in this.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 8](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/50762311).

> Chapter 8: Local History

This is the second History chapter. I did consider separating it into two chapters, but thought better of it. (Otherwise the first of the two would be yet another chapter where it can't really be said that anything happens.)

> According to the stories, the gems used to bring deliveries of building materials for the improvement of the settlement. This was a long, long time ago, generations before even your grandparents.

The intended implication is that the gems have dismantled a large number of human structures, and thus had plenty of building materials that could be redistributed as necessary.

> "Pink Diamond wanted the best for the humans that were now in her care. The buildings people used to live in were too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and didn't even have running water. There's a lot about our homes that it's easy to take for granted."

Yet again, I'm trying to portray the dwellings as more up-to-date than they would have been 250 years ago.

> PeeDee, this is neither the time nor place for politics.

One of the main jokes of the story is that the decision to produce bread or potatoes is considered a contentious political issue. Still, it's understandable when food is scarce and they don't have the power to make decisions about many other aspects of life.

> We don't know enough about how books were printed in the old days to copy the same methods, so the machine was designed completely from scratch.

It's perhaps telling that the gems tolerate the limited manufacture of books, but ensured that methods of their mass-production were forgotten.

> "We mustn't forget that humanity's reckless overuse of technology was a major contributing factor to the decline of our planet. Now, everything has to be authorised by the gems so they can be sure we're not doing any more harm. The real danger is with machines that need wood to burn. Wood is a very precious resource, so we mustn't use any more than we need to cook our food and keep warm in the winter."

I'm not 100% happy that I only got round to establishing this in the same chapter that it becomes an important issue.

The gems would make it their business to suppress any real scientific progress by humanity. This would definitely extend to Ronaldo's experiments with electricity. What if you let the humans do what they want for a few decades, and suddenly they figure out how to communicate between settlements by radio? It would compromise the 'divide' part of 'divide and conquer'.

> **AN EMPTY VESSEL MAKES THE LOUDEST SOUND**
> 
> **WISDOM IS THE DAUGHTER OF EXPERIENCE**
> 
> **WASTE NOT, WANT NOT**

I already knew the first and last ones, but I looked up the one about wisdom on some list of old phrases.

> "Ronaldo Fryman is a reasonably well-mannered student," Priyanka said quietly, as if to reassure herself.

From the outset, the investigation is prejudiced against people who seem like troublemakers. Ronaldo appears a harmless eccentric and thus escapes scrutiny for a while.

> She took a seat opposite her mother and they ate their food in companionable silence.

They should probably have had a conversation instead of sitting in silence, but I couldn't think of anything.

> "Your mom takes no prisoners, right?"

This is one of those phrases where I had to wonder whether it was a modern coinage. Well, it was certainly in use in the 1800s. Before that, I'm not sure whether it was in the common parlance as such, but allow me a little artistic license here.

> "She can be quite stern," Connie admitted. "But she's a good teacher. She knows an awful lot."
> 
> PeeDee nodded toward the door. "I bet nothing prepared her for _that_ awful lot."

This joke was improvised in the moment while I was writing it, and under the circumstances I am quite pleased with it.

> "It's nice to have the opportunity to see people outside of class. Moving here has been a bit different to how I expected it would be. Where I grew up there was... well, there was nobody my age, and ever since..."
> 
> "Here we are!" Ronaldo interrupted, unlatching the bottom half of the door.

This was intended simply as a mildly amusing moment of Ronaldo being insensitive, but I suppose in a sense it's revealing of his ulterior motives blinding him to any real empathy with Connie. For most of the story, he's too fixated on his own plans to notice that Connie isn't really on board.

> "These help us regulate the air coming in and going out. My father has been working for years on the most efficient way to burn wood. See how there are two doors in the stove? The two chambers facilitate a multi-stage process by which charcoal..."
> 
> "Sorry... I'm sorry to interrupt, Ronaldo," Connie said.

Here you can see the precise extent to which I was prepared to research combustion.

> "We usually have dinner here," he explained. "You've never seen a cleaner kitchen than the one at home."

This line is an addition to the original draft. At this point I hadn't been sure whether the Fryman family also lived in this building. Later on I decided that no, they have a separate house, and so I thought I'd better make that clearer at the outset.

> There were potatoes, yes, but also carrots and some other vegetables, and from the smell of it there was a hint of some type of meat.

The first mention of meat in any dish. They're not a society of vegetarians, but meat is not constantly available. Rearing animals for meat is inefficient.

> "Simple: a potato, and whatever's left over from last night's labskus!"

I originally read this joke about scouse, the national dish of Liverpool. So this is a speculative alternate etymology. In real life, scouse is an abbreviation of lobscouse, which was also known in European countries by names such as labskaus. So, perhaps the Frymans have distant origins in that part of the world, and the name of the dish eventually corrupted to labskus.

It seemed worthwhile including this, because it had to do with potatoes.

> "I still don't quite understand how the food manufactories work. I mean, how you make food for other people every day and still keep things fair."

This comment, and the conversation following, is my pre-emptive justification of a system that probably doesn't hold up to that much scrutiny. The real reason the Fryman family serve out cooked potatoes is because that's what they do in the show, and the game of writing an AU is to create parallels with the main timeline so that things feel familiar as well as different. It doesn't really make that much sense in a society with no money. Ronaldo's explanation about the centralisation of labour is valid, but in that case you'd expect it all to be organised centrally rather than according to the whims of Messrs Fryman and Pita (running competing restaurants in a world with no market.)

> "Is that true? About small settlements failing?"
> 
> PeeDee pushed his bowl away. "Seems that way. Only from what we know about people who've been relocated here."

Of course, although we know the gems wouldn't be setting up any new settlements, nobody in the existing settlements would hear anything about it if they did. They only have the testimony of people coming in to B1C7. The ones who leave could be going anywhere.

> Nearest to the steps she had descended were numerous small sacks of firewood pellets.

By what means is the wood rendered into pellets, and is this more efficient than having it in its traditional stick form? These are questions that will not be answered, the mere raising of them being deemed enough to add depth to the world.

> There was a slight dampness to the walls, and Connie stayed clear of them as she navigated through the space.

A brief concession to the fact that, despite establishing that the boardwalk and adjoining buildings are raised to be clear of the influence of the sea, I am suddenly asserting that they have basements. They probably get some water coming in on bad days.

> "No, the worst that can happen to you is that you lose consciousness... for a few days. Which I concede is quite serious, but that's only if you eat the wrong kind. These mushrooms are perfectly safe, I assure you. Would you care to try one?"

A brief glimpse of how the organic regulator processes toxic chemicals. The joke is that Ronaldo would totally have died from eating a poisonous mushroom. That's how jokes work.

> "Well," said Connie, "people grow plants on their windowsills. You need somewhere with windows, not a dark basement."
> 
> "No need to tell me," Ronaldo sighed. "Why is it that we live right next to a beach and yet I can't get the glass I need for my experiments? I've told Mr Dewey over and over but he doesn't want to hear it."

I was making this dialogue up as I went along, and realised Connie had a good point here. So I had to make some vague excuse for why Ronaldo lacks resources for his science. To be fair, it's adequately set up by the conversation with Sadie in chapter 4.

> I inherited this project from a fellow enthusiast who was unfortunately unable to complete it.

This may have been his mother.

> And the really exciting part: when it's time to take a new sample, we also take a little of the soil from each jar and use it to grow cress!

Cress is the ideal plant for science experiments. I remember this from school.

> So despite the evidenced decline, the deterioration of each sample had been halted.

I added this clarifying sentence as, although the preceding paragraph made sense when I wrote it, it made less sense when I read it back.

> "So... maybe the ongoing effect of pollution from the original human colony that used to be here."

This is the effect of indoctrination under the Diamond Authority. Connie takes it as a given that humanity is to blame for the state of the planet. When presented with evidence to the contrary, she is ready to believe that humanity is somehow continuing to damage the planet despite living according to the gems' instructions for 250 years. This doesn't make sense, but there's a cognitive blind spot stopping her from reexamining the central tenets of her worldview.

> About a dozen potatoes were arranged in a crescent. Every potato was pierced on both sides by sticks of metal, each of which went into the next potato so that they were all connected together. This arrangement culminated in a pair of very thin, flexible metal rods.

Ronaldo might not have developed this experiment from scratch. It could be that disparate fragments of knowledge have been passed around in secret among those willing to defy the gems.

> He carefully bent the metal rods toward the fish and began to prod at its insides.
> 
> Nothing at first. But then, almost imperceptibly, the fish twitched.

I arrived at this concept incrementally, and in retrospect the idea is so complete that it feels like I should have got it right away.

When I was first coming up with ideas for this story, the initial thought was that Ronaldo had something hidden in the lighthouse. I can't remember in what order I thought of Amethyst and a demonstration of electricity. I had an image early on of Ronaldo demonstrating plants being grown under electric lights, in a basement room which also contained secrets about the gems and the settlement. But there wasn't really any reason to grow plants this way, and how would he generate enough electricity for lighting?

So, a smaller-scale electrical project. Suddenly the idea of the potato battery suggested itself, not only as a sufficiently plausible method, but one thematically linked to Ronaldo.

For a while I was still fixated on electric light, trying to figure out whether he could realistically have a light bulb that could generate any meaningful output. Finally I abandoned this and went back to basics, thinking of Galvani's experiments reanimating frog's legs. This would have been perfectly satisfactory, but when I realised I could use a fish instead, it was too perfect. Now it wasn't just a science experiment, it was a combination of the signature ingredients of Beach Citywalk Fries and Fish Stew Pizza.

The good thing is that you don't have to invent the symbolism, you just put stuff in that connects and let the symbolism sort itself out. Something about the key to advancement only coming about when both sides of the settlement's main ideological schism come together?

> _Insane,_ she thought. _He has to be insane._ To have not only done this, but to be showing it off as if it was something to be _proud_ of.
> 
> To hoard food was taboo, yes. But this... _wasting_ food... this was beyond contemplation.

To be honest, this was a difficult scene to write, but I needed to write it in order to get to this bit. (It's precisely because it was conceptually important that I found it difficult. There's less pressure involved in writing inconsequential twaddle. Maybe I was procrastinating?)

Connie's reaction is predictable, and it will become clear that the Fryman boys were fully expecting it. Connie, not knowing their plan, finds their actions incomprehensible. A rational individual would not reveal this device to someone close to the peacekeeper.

> Her eyes widened. "Maybe this is why the fields are dying! What were you thinking!?"

She isn't thinking straight, and this causes her to make statements that are easily debunked. Applying her flawed logic to a specific, local situation may be what finally allows her to question it.

> Ronaldo shook his head sadly. "Very disappointing, Connie. I had hoped you were a free thinker who could recognise progress, not just another mouthpiece for Diamond Authority propaganda."

The word 'propaganda' is a bit of a cheat, because it only gained its current meaning in our 19th century. (I don't know this stuff off the top of my head, by the way. My process was to look up words or phrases any time they 'felt' too modern.) A functionally equivalent word failed to suggest itself, and so I left it in.

> "They help us," PeeDee asserted, "only as much as they choose to. Did you never think that maybe they don't want us out of the settlements? That the current situation suits them just fine?"
> 
> "Lose your preconceptions!" Ronaldo boomed. "Open your mind to reality!" He and PeeDee looked imploringly at Connie, as if it were incumbent on her to concede on all points.

It's barely worth mentioning, but I added these two lines at the last minute out of concern that the crescendo to this scene was badly-paced and ended too abruptly.

> (She almost added, "don't try to stop me," but was reluctant to even acknowledge the concept.)

Connie fears she may be in physical danger in this scene, perhaps understandably.

> A light was burning in one of the upper windows of the hall, but otherwise the place was deserted.

Probably Mr Dewey doing Mayor Dewey stuff. Inconsequential to the plot.

> They obviously knew it was forbidden technology, or else why would they be hiding it in the cellar? But it must give off an energy signature the gems could somehow detect, and they had been searching for it ever since.

Not knowing about Amethyst, Connie is reasoning from a false premise. Probably the gems would only know if humans were concealing larger-scale electrical works. (Is Connie really in a position to envisage the concept of an 'energy signature'? I suppose she might have a handle on some science-fiction-type concepts, having seen gemtech up close.)

> They had been protecting and advising humanity for more than two centuries. If all that was part of some kind of _trick_... what on earth would be the point of it?

Connie never does get to learn the answer to this, and it's the cause of a lot of conflict with Ronaldo and PeeDee.

> Inside, she had frozen with a sudden thought: did Mr Fryman even know what Ronaldo was up to? Who was in on it?

Big questions! Big questions that will not be answered!

It's almost embarrassing to reveal why I never clarified who PeeDee and Ronaldo were working with. Look, you never know what's going to strike a chord with people, do you? One day someone wonders "what if Connie was a Crystal Gem instead of Steven," and suddenly people are writing stories about it left and right. Who was to say that the tale of Connie's struggles in a world conquered and exploited by Pink Diamond wouldn't turn out to be exactly what the internet never knew it wanted? If this setting resonated with people, and anyone else wanted to write about it, wouldn't it be more considerate not to have filled in every last detail? It would give people room to make their own interpretation without contradicting the existing material.

I can give other post-hoc justifications. It's a small world with not many characters, and might start to seem even smaller if most of them were confirmed to be in on the secret. It sustains an ongoing tension after the initial reveal. It allows the reader to project their own ideas onto the characters, which might be more interesting than anything I came up with. Some co-conspirators would be outside the main cast and violate the self-imposed rule of no OCs. All genuine reasons, but not the original reason.

Still, I'll offer some guesses here, which are no more valid than your own.

Buck: not in on it, may have his suspicions?  
Sadie: not in on it.  
Lars: confirmed not in on it by Ronaldo.  
Mr Fryman: I can't see how he wouldn't know about everything, but he probably chose not to involve himself.  
Jenny: supplied fish for the experiment but doesn't know about Amethyst.  
Kiki: not sure, might know about the experiment since Jenny knows.  
Vidalia: I could see her knowing more than she lets on. (There's precedent for her being friends with Amethyst...)  
Onion: wouldn't be interested as he has his own inscrutible agenda.  
Bill Dewey: too close to the Authority to be trusted.  
Barbara Miller: too close to Bill Dewey to be trusted.  
Greg DeMayo: too close to Barbara to be trusted.  
Mrs Lezner: would instantly inform Doug if she found out.

Again, I would like to emphasise that none of this is official. Ask me on another day and I might see it differently.

> "Bring your book down here," her mother calmly responded, looking back down. "It's wasteful to have lights burning in two rooms. It's only going to get darker these coming months."

Not much to add to this, but it's a small extra cruelty heaped on the character, isn't it?

> She muddled her way through the first chapter without really taking it in, and quickly found herself reading the same paragraphs over and over again, the scene in the manufactory basement replaying on a loop in her mind.

Another search for old literature gave me Voltaire's _Micromégas_. I added in this sentence once I'd actually read _Micromégas_ and realised quite how short it really is. It turns out Connie was more shaken up than I originally thought, and failed to make a dent in a book not much longer than this chapter.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 9](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/51000664).

This entire chapter only exists to solve a temporal issue within the plot. For the Frymans to decide they trust Connie, enough time needs to have passed that they would know if she had betrayed their confidence. So I had to come up with a day's worth of stuff to happen in the meantime.

> Chapter 9: Onion, Flatbread & Soup

This is the best title I could come up with. It seems clever, but isn't. I couldn't identify any real linking theme between the events so I just listed some food.

> There was a general air of activity, and amongst other people she saw Barbara Miller, directing some men as they carried bunting and other supplies toward the civic hall.

I don't know that I was consciously thinking about a reason to have a harvest festival take place, but I suspect it's mainly useful as an anchoring point around which to perceive the chronology of the next few days. I'm not wholly certain what a harvest festival is really for or what it entails, despite having attended at least one such event.

> Connie wondered what was the significance of this visit. Surely not a security meeting, or she'd be going to the house. So maybe some other kind of meeting, with Mr Dewey. Or with all of them.

In truth, the reason for Zircon's visit is so that Doug would have an opportunity to inform on Ronaldo if he knew about it. We are left to assume that the Frymans somehow knew this opportunity would arise. I imagine it's some kind of routine meeting to check up on the current state of the harvest, so the gems have a rough idea of how many fruits they might need to manufacture. Perhaps you can imagine something more convincing.

> Then she found the note near the left end of the keyboard that resonated awkwardly through the whole instrument.

Our piano did this.

> Connie sighed. This was boring. She had thought it might be good for taking her mind off things, but it just felt like a waste of time.

This is my uncensored assessment of the success of this chapter so far.

> Connie focused on not damaging any plants as she picked her way through. "You... oof... you shouldn't be taking shortcuts through here," she said, and looked around, guilty.

Whether this is Onion's intention is up for debate, but the effect is that Connie is getting a lesson in being less respectful of the privacy of people's homes.

> Things got worse when Onion casually strolled in through the back door of somebody's house.

The lesson continues, but this also has a worldbuilding purpose. It establishes that the doors to the houses are not locked. This lends credibility to Ronaldo's later plan to hide the Oracle in someone else's house without their knowledge. (As previously discussed, theft is not really a problem in the settlements.)

> "He always looks a bit... glum. I suppose he misses being able to go out on the water? It must be tough."

I'm not sure how well this works. Yellowtail barely appears in the story, and from this one remark you are expected to extrapolate a whole lot of information about Onion's home life. But I'm not an expert on interpersonal drama, so I hoped the reader could help me out by bringing their own interpretation to the table.

> Some way out, a strange translucent sea creature was stranded on the beach, its numerous thin tentacles trailing across the sand.

Specifically, it is a jellyfish.

> "I suppose," she began, but when she turned round she saw that Onion was already climbing back up to the boardwalk and wandering off.

Sometimes, when I write a character getting interrupted mid-sentence, I have a specific idea of what they were about to say. Not in this case, though. I suspect it would have been an unhelpful attempt at philosophy.

> He looked at the fruit and then at Connie with a hint of wariness, but then he smiled and began throwing the apple up into the air and catching it. He repeated this exercise as they walked to Onion's house, throwing the apple higher and higher until Connie worried it would fall on the ground and be spoiled.

Famously, Onion is never shown eating food (avocado-based beverages excepted,) and I have appropriated this trend here as well.

> Still, she felt she was gaining some insight into the boy's odd behaviour. His parents seemed a little... strange.

Again, the backwards logic of the story rears its head. We all know that Onion is like this anyway, and yet here I am trying to attribute it to the particular circumstances of this timeline. Just embrace it.

> Even though the painting was propped up at floor level, Connie felt as though the gem was looking down on her. The overall effect was perversely impressive: humanity's glorious benefactor appeared as a cruel tyrant, staring down at Connie with transparent contempt.

I sort of intended for this to have a subconscious effect on Connie. Although she interprets it as evidence that Vidalia is misguided, it begins to open her mind to the idea that there could be other ways of perceiving Pink Diamond.

> She was beginning to get an idea of the problems Onion's family were facing. Yellowtail mired in unhappiness, Vidalia channeling her frustrations into art, and Onion caught in the middle with no choice but to express himself through mischief.

The lesson of Onion's tour helps Connie along the way to her decision to cooperate with PeeDee and Ronaldo. (Again, whether this was Onion's intention all along is unclear.) Although not ready to accept that the gems could be in any way responsible for the condition of the planet, she begins to see them as fallible.

> Connie looked around and saw Buck Dewey, Jenny Pita and Sadie seated at one of the tables. Buck waved her over.

Most of the conversation scenes are written with the express goal of delivering certain pieces of information, but this one is a bit more free-form. Throughout the story I tried not to revise dialogue too much once I had written it, so it could at least retain some element of spontaneity.

> "Festivity is in the mind," Buck calmly asserted. "Anything can be a festival if you approach it with the right energy."

I'm not great at writing characters with distinct voices, but it was easy enough to just have Buck spew out nonsense like this at every turn. It's not necessarily consistent with his character in the show, but it's certainly consistent.

> (This latter was an unusual question, as Connie had been brought up to believe that disliking foods was a frivolous luxury.)

Perhaps a precursor to the sense of superiority Connie begins to feel over the older kids.

> Jenny shrugged. "There's only two kinds of fish: normal fish, and strange fish. These were the normal kind."

I almost put 'weird fish' as a pointless Radiohead reference, but didn't.

> "Well," Connie decided, "I don't think it would be wise for either of us to take sides. Or tactful to discuss it in this setting."

Connie feels that they should remain impartial due to their familial ties to the administration. She fails to include Sadie in this as she still hasn't realised the connection with Barbara.

> "I think it's nice to have a choice of eateries," Sadie offered. "I don't worry too much about the reasoning behind them."

As Buck points out, Sadie has independently invented centrism.

I'm not sure how clearly the politics of food are conveyed to the reader. But I didn't want to have the characters explain in any more detail, to show the understanding of these issues is second nature to them.

> "The point still stands. Luxury through variety. Refusing to take a side could be seen as a tacit rejection of Mr Fryman's pragmatist approach."
> 
> "You eat at both places too," Sadie protested weakly.
> 
> Buck smiled, not unkindly. "But rather than denying the contradiction, I accept it. You can't pick and choose whether you pick and choose."

I added these lines shortly before publication. I wanted to say 'utilitarian' instead of 'pragmatist', but I believe the gems' takeover occurred before this could fully emerge as a philosophy. Anyway, I'd come up with Buck's final line here as a better explanation of why Sadie's position doesn't make sense, so I had to give him an opportunity to say it.

> Connie felt the need to change the subject.

Translation: I ran out of ideas for this conversation thread, and went off on a complete non-sequitur.

> Connie nodded. It made sense, as Lars was more of a lone wolf. "What about tomorrow? You'll be going to the festival together, right?"

Connie continues to inherit Steven's rose-tinted perception of Lars. She interprets his solitude as characteristic of inner strength, while continuing to assume he and Sadie are in a relationship.

> "You're in for a treat," Buck announced. "Games and competitions. People seeing who grew the biggest or most unusual vegetable. Performances." He smiled wryly. "The whole thing is so tedious. It's great."
> 
> Connie didn't pretend to understand this assessment, but soldiered on.

Buck's sense of postmodern irony still persists, in a world that has no understanding of it.

> True creativity takes place in the margins of a story.

If this is a defence of my own writing, it's a particularly incoherent one.

> Even Shakespeare was a hack when it came to subject matter.

I couldn't really refrain from mentioning the most famous western writer who would also be known to our protagonists. Buck is seemingly aware that many of the plays were retellings of existing stories. Now that I think about it, it's a bit strange that he would know this.

> Connie started on a piece covered with slices of egg, zucchini and mad-apple.

Mad-apple is an archaic name for the aubergine/eggplant.

> "I heard there's going to be a subsidy this year," Sadie volunteered in between mouthfuls.

The existence of this rumour could be related to the meeting taking place on the same day.

> The older kids had started merrily reminiscing about some incident from years past, and Connie was keenly reminded of her status as an outsider. _If you all knew what I knew,_ she thought, _maybe you wouldn't be so cheerful._

The older kids' flippant attitude has established an ideological distance between them and Connie. She also starts to see the attraction of knowing a secret, which may influence her decisions further down the line.

> "...what was it he called you? The third-worst student he'd ever taught?"

I had a teacher who used to tell us we were the second-most badly behaved class he'd ever taught. Reining in the hyperbole makes it that much more believable.

> "'You haven't even distinguished yourself at being bad!'" she quoted.

This owes a debt to Lee and Herring's characterisation of their double-act as "not even the most mediocre."

> "Wisdom is in the ear of... eh, never mind." Buck returned to his food.
> 
> _Wisdom is the daughter of experience,_ Connie thought.

Buck is doing a variation of 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder', but halfway through he realised he couldn't think of an auditory equivalent of 'beholder'.

The callback to the phrase from the senior classroom is an example of the literary cheat of repeating something to make it seem more meaningful and/or significant. Actually, when the subject came up I was reminded of the phrase, and so I had Connie be reminded of the phrase as well. It could represent her drawing the conclusion that none of these kids really have enough experience to know what they're talking about. (Whereas she has secret knowledge and is therefore special.) This is also the point at which she decides she's had enough of the conversation.

> But, disconcertingly, when she got to the manufactory there was only Mr Fryman serving. "No, the boys aren't here, I'm afraid. Not sure where they've got to this afternoon. Is there anything I can get you?"

They're still avoiding Connie until tomorrow.

> Close to the hall itself she could see her father and Mr Dewey. They appeared to be deep in conversation, and did not notice her.

This is really just meant as a reminder of the threat of Doug's investigation. It could also foreshadow the upcoming searches, although I'm not sure whether it'd really make sense for him to talk to Mr Dewey about them. Maybe as a professional courtesy?

> For example, she had yet to locate a copy of the original Gulliver book, but remained uncertain whether no such volume existed, or she had merely failed to examine the correct shelf closely enough.

This is the last mention of Gulliver's Travels for a long while. I intended to keep Connie's search ticking over, but there weren't many good opportunities for her to ask people about it.

> A weighty tome on one of the bottom shelves caught her eye: some kind of dictionary of arts and sciences.

This is specifically a volume of [_Cyclopaedia_ , by Ephraim Chambers](http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/HistSciTech/HistSciTech-idx?type=browse&scope=HistSciTech.CycloSub). I was curious about what reference books would have been available, and found this one online. I decided arbitrarily that it would be the second volume (having given Connie the first volume of a dictionary,) and all future references to the book are emergent from this decision.

However, there's a bit of artistic license at play. There was a supplementary edition of the Cyclopaedia published 25 years later, featuring entries that were missing in the original version. The book Connie refers to mysteriously contains entries from both the original and the supplement. Feel free to close the tab in disgust at this shameless distortion of historical accuracy.

> It simply defined the potato as an edible tuber, and directed the reader to look up 'solanum'. Connie did so and was treated to a dry botanical definition — however, this led her to notice the entry on soil, which ran for numerous paragraphs.

I am indebted to the Cyclopaedia for help with the writing process. This section is simply a description of what I did myself. My advice: if you have writer's block, simply have your character look things up in a centuries-old encyclopaedia. You can even quote from it directly without falling foul of copyright law.

> To her dismay, it became apparent that certain pages had been torn out. "Who vandalises a book?" she muttered, incredulous.

I don't have an example of what would have been removed, but this book has been censored either by the gems or on their behalf. There would be some scientific or historical facts which they would want to remain unknown.

> She regarded her creation.

This is probably an MS Paint Adventures reference, what with the pumpkin and all.

> There was something indefinably creepy about it, which might not be entirely appropriate for the festival, but at least this could make it stand out.

Two things, here. First, in common with the show, our existing festivals do not exist in forms we would recognise. So there is no tradition of spooky pumpkins in the autumn.

Secondly, Connie doesn't realise this, and I didn't realise it myself at the time I was writing it, but she has unconsciously based her pumpkin design on the offensive painting of Pink Diamond. This would be made (marginally) clearer by the title image if you had read the story on Fanfiction.net.

> "But it's a problem for the settlement as a location if it can't support its own population. So we need to try and avoid that."
> 
> _By doing what, exactly?_ Connie thought, but did not see much point in asking.

Connie would not have had this thought before they moved here.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 10](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/51202018).

> Chapter 10: Harvest Festival

It seemed obvious to just name the chapter after the event. I was anxious to avoid spoilers in the chapter titles, so it's handy to have something unambiguous on the list as a frame of reference if you were trying to find your place again.

> It was still dark when Connie woke up. Her first intention was to go back to sleep until there was a reason to get out of bed, but she quickly realised she was in fact wide awake.

It's a sign of Connie's anxiety about the situation that she woke up so early. It also contrasts with her earlier difficulty adjusting to the time zone. However, I can't explain exactly what this scene is doing here. It just felt appropriate.

> It was coming up to half-past six.

I did look up realistic sunrise and sunset times for the location and time of year, but don't ask me to show my working.

> Soon afterwards, she had a similar exchange with a woman walking the opposite way carrying an empty bucket.

Where is this woman taking this bucket and what is she planning on doing with it? The most obvious thing would be to milk a goat, but in that case she'd be going in the same direction as Connie. Can it be that the author just has her carrying a bucket to nowhere, for no reason at all?

> Come to think of it, how _did_ Ronaldo acquire that fish? The boy was scarcely fleet of foot.

Heavily implying that he's in cahoots with Jenny and/or Kiki, but it's never confirmed.

> Even if Connie hadn't already know something was going on, her dad's evasive demeanor would most likely have made her suspicious.

Under pressure to get results, Doug has arranged some searches with little justification behind them. He's probably not able to entirely conceal his anxiety.

> The giant creatures in the book had such advanced faculties that they had at first only perceived humanity as insignificant microorganisms. Upon speaking to the humans, they were initially moved by man's grasp of science and philosophy, but subsequently disappointed by tales of war and prejudice, and the superficiality of his knowledge. Finally, faced with a human declaring that the earth and heavens were created for the benefit of mankind, the giants could not contain their laughter. With this, the story came to an abrupt end.

What's left out from this summary is that the giants are from outer space, which is a bit of a cheat. I had initially assumed people would know the gems were aliens, but later I decided that this wasn't common knowledge. So the justification for Connie seeing this as a metaphor for the gems is slightly diminished.

> She'd had a vague, unexamined idea that it would be somehow more sophisticated than the meagre celebrations back at settlement P5T7, more spectacular. But in many ways it was just a bigger version of the same thing. Still, there were some interesting things on display on the tables and in the sheltered stalls that had been assembled.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my readers for putting in about 75% of the work of envisioning the harvest festival.

> Sadie was standing on the periphery of the event, looking around as if searching for something.

Possibly wondering whether Lars will turn up.

> "It's old wallpaper," Vidalia explained, lifting a piece from her easel to show the faded pattern on the front.

More building supplies from the gems, removed from demolished cities.

> In colourful blocky writing, it said 'ENJOY NATURE'S BOUNTY!!' This instruction, or suggestion, was adorned with precisely two exclamation marks.

I always think two exclamation marks is funnier than three.

> On the stage itself, various props were strewn about, behind which a man (who looked familiar but whose name Connie couldn't place) was marching back and forth muttering inaudibly to himself.

It should be fairly obvious that this is Jamie getting in some last-minute rehearsal for the play. But Connie only encountered him fleetingly in chapter 7 and doesn't really know him.

> He placed a spheroid object on the counter between them. "You throw this other, smaller turnip!"

I made a conscious decision to restrict the deployment of turnips to this one scene. Yes, it's a funny word, but it's ground that has been adequately covered by Blackadder.

I'm not sure what Mr Smiley does for the rest of the year.

> "This game's a real rip-off. Mr Smiley should be ashamed of it."

This is good-natured ribbing, but Buck has misjudged his audience.

> Connie stood her ground. "We can go somewhere quieter in the square, but I'm staying where people can see us."
> 
> He let out an awkward burst of staccato laughter. "Gosh, Connie, if you don't mind my saying so, that's a bit... well, whatever you say, then. But it's only us!" He looked a little hurt.

Or should it have been a staccato burst of awkward laughter? Ah, the travails of writing. Anyway, Connie is still on a markedly different page than Ronaldo, thinking he might be actively dangerous.

> Ronaldo was sceptical. "Do you really want to hear out our views, or deflect them with more parroted gem talking points?"

I think the 'talking point' is a fairly modern concept, but it's possible to see it being arrived at independently in this timeline. I think. As for 'parroting' as a verb, I suspect that was already well-established (but can't prove it.)

> Connie made a noncommittal head gesture.

A lot of the gestures in this story would work better in a visual medium.

> "Well said indeed," Ronaldo boomed theatrically. Then, he addressed PeeDee with a conspicuous over-emphasis on his words. " _Connie's our definite equal._ Wouldn't you agree, PeeDee?"

He originally just said "An admirable sentiment" before talking to PeeDee, with the implication that this was their pre-agreed code phrase for agreeing to trust Connie. But I decided this was too subtle for Ronaldo, and replaced it with a phrase that literally spells out C-O-D-E.

> "Yeah... take it down a bit there, Ronaldo."

I wanted him to say "take it down a notch," but this phrase would appear to refer to the controls for automated machinery, and thus wouldn't quite fit the setting.

> "We're going to take you to meet the Oracle."

And so, almost literally halfway through the story, we finally get to the point. It wasn't by design that things should end up this way. I only realised when I got to the end of the first draft. The first half of the story meanders from place to place as I establish various facts about the world. The second half becomes an exercise in moving from one plot point to the next until the story can end. If I'd written less in the first half, you wouldn't have got any more in the second half. There would just have been less content.

I've been making this excuse that PeeDee and Ronaldo had to wait before letting Connie in on the secret. Of course, I could instead have come up with a plot in which they didn't have a reason to wait. But I didn't.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 11](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/51413332).

> Chapter 11: The Locked Room

I decided against naming the chapter "Connie meets the Oracle, who is Amethyst", as I felt this might have telegraphed the twist somewhat. It was either this or "A Locked Room", but I went with the definite article seeing as the next chapter also starts with "A".

There's a problem with making it a secret that a character is going to turn up, and that's that it's harder to tag the story. I obfuscated things a bit by tagging several gems that make generic appearances in the first chapter, which includes Amethysts.

> In the room beyond the doorway, sacks of grain and flour lined up on racks. Spiral stairs spanning the whole building rose from a point more or less opposite the entrance, and disappeared clockwise beyond the ceiling to the heights above. A hole in the middle of the ceiling accommodated the wooden drive shaft, which connected to a machine that looked like it was intended for processing maize. A loop of metal chain was suspended from an open trapdoor leading to the upper floors, and several dusty wooden chutes also descended through the ceiling from the next storey.

I rewrote this description shortly before publication. For your entertainment and edification, I present here the original paragraph:

"Machinery filled the room inside the entrance, and sacks of grain and flour lined up on racks. Spiral stairs spanning the whole building rose from the left of the entrance and disappeared beyond the ceiling to the heights above. A hole in the middle of the ceiling accommodated the wooden drive shaft, and other trapdoors were visible above."

I changed it because I realised after a modicum of research that you wouldn't have the grain milling machinery on the ground floor. You'd have it on the next floor up, so the flour can be collected below. (You also probably wouldn't put the entrance above ground level so you have to carry sacks of grain and flour up and down steps, but never mind.) Then, I moved the entrance-level part of the spiral stairs from by the door to opposite the door. This is because, believe it or not, it didn't make logical sense combined with the description of the steps coming up the building exterior and the blocked-off door. Just imagine all the angry comments I'd have got. From architects.

> Her conception of the space shifted as she understood that this was a continuation of the same staircase. The construction of the grist mill must have concealed a layer of the original architecture.

So I'm sure I thought this was clever and all, but doesn't the lighthouse already have a basement in-canon? So was there really any need for this trickery? Mind you, I suspect the building in the show is a modern construction. And this way has the handy effect of implying that, since it was a modification to the building after the gems took over, maybe people at the time thought it was worth creating non-obvious spaces within buildings.

> With a pointless air of secrecy, Ronaldo retrieved a key from a string which was tied round his neck and concealed under his shirt.

The key shenanigans went through a number of iterations. First the key was round Ronaldo's neck, as it is here. Then when they wanted Connie to come to the windmill in an emergency, I changed it so it was hanging from a beam outside the door. I was never really happy with this, so when I decided Connie should give Amethyst the key, I took the opportunity to change this back and say PeeDee had another copy to give Connie.

> The stranger's back was mostly concealed by a mane of waist-length off-white hair, which stirred as she turned her head toward them.
> 
> "Who's there?" she asked, and Connie recognised the voice: an Amethyst.

In a way, the fact that it's Amethyst is the big punchline of the story. You'd be forgiven for assuming it would be Sapphire, and even the preceding sentence would have supported this theory.

This reveal wasn't reverse-engineered. It came from the setting as I devised it. I simply asked myself what would have happened to the Crystal Gems in this timeline (beyond the fact that they would never have formed an alliance of that name.) Garnet only came into existence because of the rebellion. With no rebellion, Sapphire and Ruby probably didn't even have a reason to visit Earth. Pearl would still be with her Diamond.

That leaves Amethyst, emerging too late and overcooked. In this timeline, it earns her the same treatment as the Off-Colours. I wondered whether people might question this, as in the show she's tolerated on Homeworld (with the addition of some prosthetics.) My theory (which I can only assume people are on board with) is that in the show, the war caused the end of Era 1 and a big loss of resources for Homeworld, as a result of which they had to be pragmatic and relax their standards. Malformed and defective gems were still persecuted, but a lot of new gems (like Peridot) were just going to be shorter and there was nothing to be done about it.

In this timeline, the gem empire is still thriving and Amethyst does not meet their standards. So she went into hiding. But on Earth, she didn't need to hide underground when she could go and hide among humans. Then I thought that some humans might find her useful to have around, and then... I decided she was the Oracle of Delphi? To be honest, I can't quite remember how this part of the thought process came about.

> The gemstone set in her chest was marred by a hairline crack which made itself apparent as it glinted in the dim light. Her unruly hair covered one eye, but the other was striking in the fact that it was pure white, with no visible pupil. Connie realised, as the gem turned her head curiously back and forth, that she was unable to see the humans.

Not that the Oracle of Delphi was blind, but there's a certain precedent for the concept of the blind seer. And it helps to position Amethyst as this timeline's equivalent of series 1 Lapis Lazuli.

> Connie gazed into the blank sclerae, transfixed.

I basically wrote everything up to this point purely so that I could write this sentence.

> "Hah! Yeah, I was only kidding. I'm not really an oracle. That's just a nickname that kind of stuck."

This is the joke of Amethyst as the Oracle, that she doesn't really know anything. Even with her current purpose of providing information about history, she's limited by the fact that she hasn't witnessed anything first-hand for over 2000 years.

> "You can't say anything to me I haven't heard a hundred times before. Gems don't have children, we just come out of the ground. Didn't you even know that?"

This chapter features a fair bit of exposition of facts about the gems that everyone reading will already know. But it's useful in order to establish that a lot about the gems has remained mysterious in this timeline.

> Could the gems really treat their own kind so unfairly, while being so protective of another species? It didn't add up.

I don't think I handled this aspect as well as I could have. Connie spends a lot of time processing what the gems have actually done to humanity, but the inequalities in gem society are kind of breezed over.

> Connie cleared her throat politely to indicate she had a question. "So this was... right after you emerged?"

Originally Connie was more confused and asked what Amethyst was doing before this part of her story. I changed it, on the basis that Amethyst literally just explained where gems come from and Connie isn't an idiot.

> But the crack slowly kept getting bigger... until it eventually stopped, thank goodness.

This is inspired by something that once happened to my car windscreen.

> Connie let out the anxious breath she had been holding.

This originally read "Connie let out a breath she didn't realise she'd been holding." But then I learned this is apparently a tedious cliché? It was news to me.

> "It sounded like there'd been a major disagreement among the Diamonds, and that they only found a compromise at the last moment. It's weird because I've never known the Authority to not be in total accord on everything, but from the sounds of it, this one really could have gone either way. Some of the gems in the hierarchy really weren't happy about changing things, but thanks to Pink Diamond they had no choice."

This is the big confirmation of the point at which this universe deviates from the canon timeline. I even added the bit about how it could have gone either way, just in case it wasn't sledgehammer-unsubtle enough.

> "Well, what do humans do?" Amethyst shrugged. "Gems just... make more gems, and build gem stuff. We're not exactly that different."
> 
> "It... doesn't really seem that way from here," Connie said, weakly.

The first couple of visits to Amethyst were written in a fairly unstructured fashion. There's not really any great story logic behind them leaving early to go back to the festival, then coming back the next day and continuing the conversation. I'd just run out of ideas for the scene and needed the excuse to write about something else for a bit. Originally this first scene was much shorter, and skipped straight from these lines to Amethyst saying "Did I break your human brain?"

I had to add some more dialogue to the scene because it was too short, but also because I had only got around to the revelation about the gems being aliens in the second scene, and on review I realised there's no way Ronaldo would let the first visit pass without ensuring this came up. So I transplanted in a section of conversation that would have been in chapter 14, and rewrote it a bit.

> Connie reflected on the synchronicity of her having found that book. Like the fictional giant, Pink Diamond had descended from beyond the stars to discover humanity.

This is where it's a bit jarring that the extraterrestrial aspect of Micromégas wasn't mentioned in the previous chapter. Mentioning it in the context of Connie thinking it's a metaphor for gems would have implied that she already knew about their origins. An unfortunate consequence of my changing the backstory as I went along. I couldn't find a more elegant way for this to fit together.

> It felt like forbidden knowledge. Never in any of Connie's lessons had she been told that Pink Diamond wasn't from Earth — and yet, never had it been explicitly stated that she was. It was an assumption so basic, so obvious, that it wasn't even necessary to obfuscate.

I'm still not sure whether it makes realistic sense for humans to know quite so little about the nature of gems. But I think if the gems made it clear they only came to Earth a few thousand years ago, it'd be harder to convince humans that they were equally invested in saving the planet.

> Connie mulled this over. "Can we, though? It seems like the settlements operate in a similar fashion, where everyone helps out in the manner best suited to their abilities."

This is just a point that occurred to me as I was improvising some additional dialogue to finish padding out the scene. I enjoyed coming up with ways that the relationship between gems and humans would affect people's interpretation of the world and society.

This story isn't intended to be about communism. I see it more as humanity having reverted to something like a pre-capitalist social order, with the difference that the ruling class isn't interested in a tithe of the harvest. Although they are actively destroying the planet, so it kind of balances out.

> "I don't think they quite _get_ it. They learned so much about humanity, but they still couldn't stop thinking about it like gems. Seems to me like they ended up erasing a lot of what was interesting about you guys."

This stops just short of touching on the question of whether art and culture thrive on suffering. And even if this were the case, would it be worth the trade-off? The solutions to these issues may fall beyond the scope of this pretend story based on a cartoon for childrens.

> "Pink Diamond has healing powers," Amethyst explained. "If a non-defective gem got cracked then she could make them better just like that. But you can't fix broken," she said, and tipped herself and the stool sideways onto the floor by way of emphasis.

There. Connie now has all the information she needs to repair Amethyst's gem and end the story. But it isn't so obvious from her perspective.

> Somewhere, a waterspout sucked gallons of ocean into the sky.

This odd weather phenomenon is deliberately not acknowledged as being odd.

> Connie felt exhausted. Seeking refuge in mundanity, she pointed to a damaged fence post. "If someone doesn't fix that, one of the goats could get through and hurt itself."

Okay, so this is a bit of a self-conscious thing to have included. On the one hand, it alludes to Amethyst falling off the cliff in the show, perhaps as a reminder that she was established as prone to such injuries. It's also a fairly blatant metaphor along the lines of: if we let the goats out of the enclosure, they could be in danger. If we let the humans out of the settlement, they could be in danger. Faced with new information, Connie is focusing on the reassuring idea that boundaries exist for our protection.

> "Can you imagine how we felt?" Ronaldo gushed, tense with excitement. "In the face of such ground-shaking revelations about the gems?"
> 
> "That they came from the stars?" Connie agreed. "It's incredible."

Again, in the original draft this hadn't yet been revealed, so she just said the thing about them not being kind to each other.

> "They can be hurt!" Ronaldo exclaimed simultaneously. "They're not invincible, like we were always told."
> 
> Connie stared at him with distaste. " **That's** what you take from this?"

This alliance was doomed from the start. Connie's upbringing was never going to let her see the gems as out-and-out enemies. PeeDee is still trying to convince Connie, but Ronaldo naively imagines that a conversation with Amethyst will by default convert anybody fully to the cause.

> "She didn't say that. You heard her, Pink Diamond wants to save us. That's confirmed."

I always find this slightly funny, because 'confirmed' now feels like such an internet-meme word. Every time Amethyst mentions anything positive, Connie should just yell "BENEVOLENT PINK DIAMOND CONFIRMED"

> All that's happened since then is that there are less people.

Fewer people, PeeDee. There are fewer people. (An example of me trying to write conversations conversationally.)

> "There's only one explanation," Ronaldo declared. "They removed our leaders to mark the final phase of their plan to get us out of their way. This isn't protection at all, it's... managed extinction!"
> 
> Connie met Ronaldo's manic stare, and tried without success to think of anyone less suited to the responsibility of caring for the Amethyst imprisoned in that darkened room.

As in the show, Ronaldo is substantially correct. The only detail he has wrong is that the gems are eliminating 99.99% of humanity, not 100%, but that's just nitpicking really, isn't it? And as in the show, he is dismissed as a crank, in part due to the offputting delivery of his messages.

> "Why did you bring me here?" she asked quietly.
> 
> Ronaldo was confused. "Uh, to meet the Oracle. You know? In the..."

I'm more used to writing stuff that is overtly comedic. The joke here is that Ronaldo thought Connie literally didn't understand what they had been doing at the windmill. I hope you enjoyed it.

> Connie gave a sigh of exasperation. "So you just wanted to know what my _dad_ would do, if he knew about it?"

On top of their ideological differences, the revelation that PeeDee and Ronaldo aren't even interested in her allegiance for its own sake doesn't exactly endear them to her.

> "The last peacekeeper was on our side," Ronaldo said. "But our Zircon got too suspicious, and now she's gone. It's been... difficult." He looked dejected.

Now, even though there isn't nearly enough information available to guess it in advance, nobody can complain that the revelation about the peacekeeper wasn't foreshadowed in any way.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 12](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/51633835).

> Chapter 12: A Short Drama

Because the play is a short drama, isn't it, but also, Lars's house being searched is a short and dramatic event. See?

They don't all have to be clever.

> Acting opposite him was a woman Connie recognised from the bakery, wearing pink finery and a neat stage wig.

There wasn't any particular reason to cast Lars's mother in the play, other than that she was an available character.

> I need to keep my arbitrary position of power so I can spend more time telling people what to do, and assigning value to small pieces of metal!

Confirmation that the concept of currency seems almost laughably archaic.

> "Those who have opposed me were silenced! All that is in the earth and heavens was put here for my benefit, and I care not for your fanciful warnings!"

You may have noticed that the king's words echo the ending of _Micromégas_. Sometimes it's simplest just to repeat stuff and hope people will read meaning into it. Maybe Mr Dewey has read the book too?

> The king's crown was unceremoniously confiscated, and he was lightly pelted with pine cones from the audience.

This play descended into pantomime pretty abruptly. I guess this means they have pine trees? I didn't think it through to that extent; I just think a pine cone is an inherently funny object.

> ("But we were given these to throw," one person complained.)

A valid complaint, I feel. Don't invite audience participation and then make them feel tricked. (Unless you are a close-up magician.)

> Before long she found a table attended by Kiki Pita, and gratefully accepted some of the snacks which her family had catered.

I'm sure I keep referring to 'snacks' without offering any further clarification of what they actually are. Lazy worldbuilding!

> "I did break my promise a little and used my influence to get your pumpkin recognised in a semi-official award category."
> 
> "Really? What category?"
> 
> Priyanka hesitated slightly before elaborating. "Most improved."

This is an overt and deliberate Homestar Runner reference. (Specifically, the Pumpkin Carve-nival cartoon.)

> "I don't need protecting, thanks," Connie said, with less patience than she had intended.

This comes across a bit "look how strong my female characters are," but never mind. I wanted to redress the fact that Steven made no real effort to defend Lars at the end of The New Lars.

> "I'm just saying," Connie pressed on, "maybe they didn't even know Lars would be home. If you wanted to search someone's house, wouldn't today be the ideal day? Everyone's gathered right here."
> 
> "Good point," Buck admitted.
> 
> Sadie was looking worried again. "So... how do we even know that's the only house they went in?

This is indeed a valid point, but I never revisited it subsequently. To all intents and purposes it would seem they only searched Lars on this day.

> Lars snorted. "Please," he scoffed, "you all don't have anything to worry about, with your important parents."
> 
> "Really?" Sadie snapped. "You still think that's any kind of guarantee?"

Another missed opportunity for Connie to put two and two together regarding Sadie's parentage.

> Buck gazed down at her through half-lidded eyes. "So you're saying that in a situation you can't control, the only real way you can help yourself is to refrain from worrying?"
> 
> "I... suppose so?"
> 
> "Very wise," he nodded. "I think I've heard something like that before."

It's because Connie is echoing Buck's own reaction to the poor harvest, which she claimed at the time to disagree with. To be honest I only realised this as I was writing it, and figured I should acknowledge the connection. It's basically down to the fact that every dialogue I write with Buck ends up coming out pretty much the same.

> She'd also taken the liberty of helping herself to a blank sheet of wallpaper, which was already coming in handy as she'd used it to wrap up the cake.

For just a moment, the story starts working on bizarre adventure game logic. Connie has no reason to pick up a spare sheet of paper, but she does so anyway, because I guess it came up as an option when she clicked on it. The real reason is so she later has something to write her letter on. But then, I could have just let her take paper from the library, so... adventure game moon logic it is.

> "He was taunting your father and his Zircon. 'You won't find anything,'" she quoted.
> 
> "I don't think he was taunting us," Doug wearily responded. "I think he was simply remarking that we wouldn't find anything. Which we didn't."

This is in fact a vanishingly obscure reference to a 2006 police raid on some falsely-accused terror suspects in east London.

> "You don't know the details?" Connie parroted. She didn't trust herself to be proactive in her questioning without inadvertently mentioning some detail she wasn't supposed to know about.

The very same technique employed by top secret agent Solid "Metal Gear??" Snake.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 13](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/51859288).

> Chapter 13: Traditions & Responsibilities

I wasn't sure what to call this chapter. I was close to naming it On The Naivety Of Insects, but I decided that this was over-egging the pudding and that two chapter titles following that format was more than enough.

I also wasn't sure where it should end, resulting in probably the most arbitrary chapter break in the story. This and the next chapter make up a day's worth of narrative, and the chapter break was imposed in retrospect. I wanted to end it before Connie goes up the hill, but that would have made the already-long chapter 14 even longer. At least this way, 'responsibilities' can also refer to Connie's new status as a keyholder.

> Connie's instinctive priority was to save Amethyst. From a moral standpoint, the gem's fate seemed more important than anyone else's by virtue of longevity. Next to an immortal being, it was easy to see oneself as essentially disposable. This didn't feel like a particularly heroic sentiment, merely the natural order.

This echoes Connie's attitude in Sworn To The Sword. Indoctrinated from birth, Connie has no trouble viewing herself as insignificant compared to a gem, and there's no Steven around to disabuse her of this notion.

> "You were talking about... pain and tension?" she ventured.
> 
> Mrs Lezner gave her a stern look. "I asked you if you were paying attention."

This joke is brought to you by my attempts to understand the lyrics of Radiohead's 2 + 2 = 5.

> Connie anticipated one of PeeDee's ironic questions, but he appeared to have lost all interest in school.

This is because he was only participating in the first place in order to plant doubts in Connie's mind.

> "We've been thinking that for ages, though. It's kind of weird, when you think about it. It's as if they want to catch her but they can't be bothered committing the resources to it. Like it's not even that big a priority. And yet whenever they do come in, they don't hesitate to turn our lives upside-down."

I put this in to counter the possible charge that it's unrealistic for the gems not to have found Amethyst in such a small settlement. PeeDee's guesses are substantively correct. The task is probably not a huge priority, but left incomplete it will look bad for Zircon. Even if they want the situation resolving soon, that means something else to the gems than it does to humans.

> "How do they even know she's here?" Connie wondered.
> 
> PeeDee sighed. "I've wondered that myself. They just have ways of knowing things. It's not all propaganda, they really are very powerful. That's why we need the Oracle and her insight."

More hand-waving. Maybe, as posited later, they tracked Amethyst's gem through the warp network.

> This didn't answer Connie's point, and she turned up her palm in an impatient gesture.

I hope you're picturing the accompanying facial expression and unspoken "Well?"

> "Fine," PeeDee relented, "but you have to be careful. If she gets found, and me or Ronaldo get caught, they're going to want names of our co-conspirators. That includes you."

I'm not sure this threat accomplishes much other than alienating Connie further. There's been no indication the gems are in the business of torturing information out of humans. If they found Amethyst then that'd probably be an end to the matter.

> This other Jasper comes in and she's the biggest, _the_ biggest Jasper you've ever seen.

So... is this _the_ Jasper, from the show? It's a bit of an odd one, because the Jaspers carrying out the searches were described last chapter as "nearly identical," but we know the canon Jasper is somewhat unique. Perhaps production in the Beta kindergarten went better absent the rebellion?

> So in an act of symbolic resistance I just went limp, so she had to drag me out.

Lars is effectively the Gandhi of his timeline.

> "Hey," Kiki continued, "we have a whole bunch of leftovers from yesterday at the cafeteria if you want to come in after school. That goes for everyone else, too," she added, turning to the group.
> 
> "Sounds good to me," Sadie hastily enthused.

Hmm, Sadie's a bit quick to jump in there. After Kiki praised Lars's conduct and invited him for dinner ahead of everyone else. I'm sure it's nothing.

> "Everything's fine, Mom. I just wanted to let you know Kiki invited me to go round for dinner after school, and ask whether that would be all right?"

It is certainly technically true that Connie was standing in the vicinity of this invitation.

> "I've been meaning to reorganise in there for ages," said Mrs Lezner as she unlocked the door. "But there always seems to be something more important that needs taking care of."

This is inspired by a situation at my place of employment.

> _1\. A precious jewel or ſtone, of whatever kind._   
>  _2\. A race of women, dwelling in certain ſacred lands._   
>  _3\. The firſt bud of a plant._

This is based on Samuel Johnson's dictionary, but the (real) entries aren't quite worded the same, and now I can't remember whether they're actually from a different source or I just chose to paraphrase them for some reason. Technically the second entry is wrong as 'a gem' is a member of the race and not the race itself, but I didn't want the fake entry to be conspicuously more wordy than the original ones.

This is the only real glimpse of gems in any of the old literature, and a possible insight into how they were viewed at the time. It's admittedly strange that there's no mention of them in any of the other books Connie finds. To be honest, it's stranger still that the entire canon of fiction appears to be totally unchanged up until the point when the gems took over. You'd think that with the butterfly effect on the timeline caused by the gems' mere presence, none of these authors would even have been born in the first place. But it would have been a thankless task coming up with ersatz versions of 18th-century novels by fictional authors, and an even more thankless task for readers trying to figure out what on earth I was on about.

> The problem was that, by definition, she didn't know what things she didn't know.

I seem to recall Donald Rumsfeld making a similar point.

> Finally, after a lengthy tangent on the philosophical significance of mathematical constants, the day was over.

Mrs Lezner is enthusiastic about maths, I guess. About how it constitutes the set of facts that would be true even if the universe didn't exist. Sadly it's wasted on these brats.

> It turned out the older kids were already here, which had to mark the first time that her mom's lessons had ended before Mrs Lezner's.

I think I changed this from 'the first time that Connie could remember'. Like she hadn't only been living there a few weeks.

> "Well," Jenny added, "I heard there used to be six other settlements right near here but they're all gone." She reacted impatiently to the group's blank stares. "You know, B1C1, B1C2..."
> 
> "I'm almost certain that's not true," said Buck.

Another reference to an abandoned storyline. The others may scoff, but they don't know how close they were to living in a world where Jenny had it correct.

> "I'm talking about something new," Jenny protested. "Like a, a horse-drawn scythe or something."

200 years and they haven't even thrown together a rudimentary combination harvester? These people deserve to starve, frankly.

> "Celery's not so bad," Buck responded with a level stare. "It adds crunch to a salad."

This is my version of their conversation about snakes.

> "I don't know, Lars," Sadie replied cautiously. "These are ancient freedoms. If people didn't have their own patch of land to use as they please, it could affect the fabric of society."

A lot of significance is placed on the allotments. Having that bit of ground to call your own is a big thing, in a world where you have little control over any other aspect of your existence.

> "You're not going to cover much ground with what you can get from the beach. Until a whale washes up," she chuckled. "Or a kraken."

Indicating that both beasts are considered equally likely (or unlikely) to exist.

> Buck nodded. "If anyone gets hurt out there, there'll be a real tightening up of rules."

He originally said "a real crackdown," but that felt too modern.

> Around them, only a few other people had come in for food, and Mr Pita was not especially busy. He noticed Connie looking at him and narrowed his eyes, and she quickly looked away.

There's no specific meaning behind this. Just trying to raise questions in the reader's mind about who knows what.

> For all the older kids' talk about finding a better way of doing things, they seemed awfully quick to dismiss each other's ideas in favour of tradition and stagnation. For once, Connie felt as if she was on the side of progress, and it was refreshing.

The counterpoint to this ended up in the next chapter, when Ronaldo dismisses the idea of healing Amethyst. It doesn't work as well structurally with the chapters broken up as they are, but what can I do? Another weekly chapter is another boost in readership, and I can't turn that down just to make the work thematically coherent.

> After a few moments, the door creaked open and Ronaldo stared intently through the gap. "Were you followed?" he dramatically hissed.
> 
> Connie slowly turned to the hill, where both of them had an unobstructed view all the way back to the main settlement. In the lingering daylight, any other human ascending the slope would have been clearly and immediately visible. "I don't think so," she said, her voice deadpan.

I restricted myself to a single deployment of 'deadpan', it being one of the more overused words in fan fiction. (Especially as a verb, for some reason. Characters 'deadpanning' their dialogue left and right.) Anyway, I feel its use here is justified.

> "But no, Lars doesn't know anything about it."

An actual confirmation of the level of involvement of one of the characters? I must have been feeling unwell.

> "It's a better option than getting caught."

I added this line in an attempt to make this feel like the end of a chapter. The text originally ran as follows:

> Connie felt simultaneously anxious and queasy. "I don't know if I can do that to someone, with a knife. Does it hurt her?"
> 
> PeeDee shrugged. "I don't think so. Not like it would for us, at least. You should ask her yourself."
> 
> With that, he beckoned and the three of them made their way downstairs to the hidden room. Ronaldo unlocked the door as the previous time.
> 
> "I conceal my key using this string!" he told Connie in a stage whisper, returning the key into his clothing. "Keep yours hidden at all times."

...then it just continued into the text of chapter 14. You see what I mean about it being the most arbitrary chapter break? Maybe I should have gone the whole hog and cut it off in the middle of


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 14](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/52087558).

a sentence.

> Chapter 14: Secret History

An alternative title would have been "Amethyst's Adventures Among The Humans", but obviously this would have been a spoiler for anyone browsing the contents list. I considered including it as a subtitle, but it didn't seem worth it.

> "So, being a gem among humans is a bit like that, only it's worse, because the humans are so much more like you than animals are, and you understand each other, and then they live such short lives that it gets hard to bear." She sighed. "In the end it's better not to think of humans as individuals. That's just how I cope."

I wondered whether the reason Amethyst (in the show) was friends with Vidalia, while the other Crystal Gems remained aloof from humanity, was because she was the youngest and hadn't had enough time to get bummed out that her human friends kept dying of old age. Like, maybe Pearl already tried getting to know humans for a few centuries but it just got too depressing. (Negated by Steven Universe Future, but never mind.)

> Connie was anxious to get to the bottom of the Pink Diamond question, but wasn't sure how best to approach it, or even how much Amethyst really knew.

To be honest I didn't really have a concrete idea of what Connie's motives were in speaking to Amethyst at this point. I just took it as read that she would want to see her again and get whatever information she could. The idea of 'the Pink Diamond question' is impressively vague, and it's debatable whether Connie really asks it.

> "The process of building and making gems on Earth. On Pink Diamond's orders, it was all happening on a completely different time scale."

I assume that in-canon the colonisation of Earth would have long been completed by the present day, but there needed to be a reason for it to have taken this long and keep the same characters without transposing them into pre-history (which would just be bewildering, let's face it.) The story logic used to justify this is that Pink Diamond needed more time in order to enact a cruelty-free phasing out of humanity.

Originally PeeDee chipped in after the mention of Earth, and this was where the reveal was that gems are aliens:

> PeeDee interrupted. "Tell her what you mean by 'on Earth'."
> 
> Amethyst hadn't turned toward PeeDee, but tilted her head to one side when he spoke. "Oh, right. Yeah, Earth isn't the only place with gems, we exist on lots of planets."

As previously established, I decided it didn't make sense not to bring this up in Amethyst's first scene.

> Connie turned her attention to PeeDee and Ronaldo. "What did you guys think when you found out the gems weren't from Earth?" she asked.

The aforementioned might help to explain why Connie suddenly starts soliciting opinions about it when she could easily have done so yesterday.

> "The colonising force from beyond the stars. Condemning humanity's greed while coming here to seize our resources in the exact same manner. And once everything is gone, and who knows how soon that'll be, they'll return to the heavens and leave us to our doom."

As before, Ronaldo is mostly correct, except for the last detail. Because Connie can see that the last detail doesn't make sense, she can't be convinced of the rest of it either.

> She gave out a deep sigh. "I never met him again."

This gave me trouble! Of course my instinct was to write "I never saw him again." But, uh, Amethyst can't see. "I never heard his voice again" didn't seem quite right. I don't know whether the final iteration is right, but it's what we're stuck with.

What actually became of the historian is a mystery. Amethyst's gem changing hands is intended to establish that this was a very confusing and disruptive time.

> The minor detail of the new order being presented to the humans as a fait accompli was in retrospect so obvious, so necessary, that it didn't even register as controversial. By any cursory analysis, there was no way the Authority could realistically have conducted some kind of opinion survey on the entire population. The concept of humanity's co-authorship of its own destiny was merely a necessary allegory. In a way, Connie had always known this.

I hope I've done some justice to the mindset of the brainwashed. Connie is able to take information that directly contradicts the propaganda, and seamlessly integrate it into her worldview without addressing the contradiction. Clearly, she reasons, people were never meant to understand this as the literal truth. That would make the gems liars, and the first principle is that they are not liars.

> I couldn't tell how much time was passing while I was in the box, but one day I found myself in open space and I was unable to resist reforming.

Does it contradict canon, the idea that you can stop a gem from reforming by putting it in an enclosed space? Lapis couldn't reform while embedded in that mirror, but maybe that's because it was constructed so that her gem would power the mirror.

> "Everyone in the settlement had been relocated there from their old homes, and all the original signs had been taken down, so there was just no way of telling. It was somewhere with a warm climate. Anyway, this woman, Catherine, was the youngest person in the settlement. She had been born there shortly after the move. After that nobody else had any kids, so she'd grown up as the only child in a settlement of adults."

This is a very Half-Life 2 setting (minus the climate), and it should be noted that the game took place in the first years of the Combine occupation. So some extrapolations could be made to the early years of the gem occupation.

Note that the historian Amethyst described earlier didn't get a name, and originally Catherine was also going to be nameless. But talking around it made Amethyst's speech seem very unnatural. Catherine's not really an original character, though, more like an original plot device. I figured she might be French.

> Obviously I didn't know anything about what was going on, but when they explained how everyone had these regulators that stopped them having children, I made what I think you'd call an educated guess.

The description of an Earth with its original population density, but with everyone having organic regulators, is important for Connie's final insight of how to liberate Amethyst.

> One thing they sometimes talked about was how before the gems came, they went hungry a lot. There'd been a lot of shortages toward the end, which maybe helped people see the Diamond Authority's intervention as a good thing. Apart from that, they had a big area of the city with parks and stuff, to roam around and make use of as they pleased. (...) The only real restriction was the wall round the edge of the settlement.

So... I wasn't consciously trying to evoke this, but these 'temporary settlements' are uncomfortably like ghettos. The gems never needed to actually kill humans, they could just stop them from breeding and wait out their natural lifespans. During this time, the humans are treated well and may even have a better quality of life than before the gems took over. But the implication of this settlement is that a huge drop in Earth's population was effected within, what, 50 years or so? Mostly by fencing them in and letting them die of old age. Would accomplishing this without violence make it any less cruel?

To some extent, the premise of this story is a thought experiment about genocide. Life in the settlements doesn't seem so bad on the face of it - sign me up for never getting ill, at least. You'd certainly choose it over being rounded up and shot. But in the long run, the effect will be identical.

You may find this uncomfortable to think about. I know I did.

> "That's all in the past, though," Ronaldo blustered. "Stick to the stuff that happened two hundred years ago. What did they do to humans who didn't cooperate?"
> 
> "You know I don't know that," Amethyst scowled.

Ah, a little levity. Then, Amethyst continues to be unsuited to the role imposed on her. At the most crucial point in her story, she was unable to perceive anything, and the truth behind the gems' coup is lost.

> "I never met anyone at the temporary settlement that hadn't accepted the gems as leaders. Everyone always knew they were powerful, and humans had always had superstitions about them. Maybe in the cities it was a different story, but I never heard anything about it. And when we moved to the next settlement, it was all humans who'd been born afterwards, so nobody could have known anyway. When we arrived there, Catherine was the only one who knew anything much about life under the old system, and a lot of that was from having me to talk to."

So, one has to wonder: if nobody in the temporary settlement had challenged the gems, what happened to the people who did? Were they in another settlement? Did they try to fight the Diamond Authority, and pay with their lives? Did the military forces of the time remain loyal to their monarchs? It's almost impossible to believe there was no violence, but ultimately the truth is inaccessible to the characters, and thus the reader. I think I felt it was better left unsaid, so you could speculate for yourself.

In the first generations following the coup, the gems made sure the old days became a distant cultural memory. I didn't really go into the logic of how this was accomplished, but I could envisage them playing a bit more fast-and-loose with human familial bonds in the early years. You could easily populate a settlement only with young people who haven't had time to learn much about the old world. Still, this isn't established in the story, so maybe you can come up with a better version.

> "Don't blame yourself," Connie reassured her, "blame that Zircon. You're just as much a victim as us."
> 
> (This earned her an almost inaudible 'hmph' from PeeDee.)

Slight foreshadowing of how much this business has cost PeeDee and Ronaldo. Also indicative of their general refusal to acknowledge a gem's suffering.

> PeeDee rubbed his chin contemplatively. "We could, uh... bury her?"

Why is this such a bad idea? I think they should have explored this a bit further.

> She hunched her shoulders self-consciously as she brought her hand to her mouth and licked her palm. Then, solemnly, she pressed the damp hand against Amethyst's gem.

Let me tell you a bit about the philosophy behind this storyline.

This was another emergent idea. I didn't come up with organic regulators as a way of getting to this; rather, I thought of this because I had already come up with the organic regulator as the means of suppressing human reproduction. Because of Pink Diamond's powers and sensibilities, it seemed obvious that it would also heal the user. Faced with the problem of Amethyst's gem, I suddenly thought, wouldn't it be a satisfying and elegant resolution if Connie realised this meant she could transfer the healing power through her spit, mirroring Steven's similar realisation in the cartoon?

And then I thought, no, it wouldn't. It wouldn't be satisfying, because it is too easy.

These are science-fiction technologies beyond the understanding of our protagonists. If Connie is able to repurpose the regulator to solve the problem with little mental effort, I know it would be jarring for me as a reader. Let me give you two examples.

In Stranger Things, the children are looking for a bizarre anomaly in space and time. This is all they know about what they are looking for. They ask their science teacher what a bizarre anomaly in space and time would be like, and he speculates that it might cause electromagnetic interference. One of the kids guesses that if this is the case, it might skew the reading of a compass. They follow their compass round in a big circle that immediately leads to the anomaly. This was literally the first thing they tried.

In The Amber Spyglass, Dr Malone is stuck in the wilderness in some parallel universe. She needs a way of perceiving the mysterious theological particles known as Dust. Then she decides to mess about with some amber for like twenty minutes and comes up with the eponymous spyglass which immediately works. (Sorry, it's years since I read the book and this synopsis may not be 100% accurate.)

I'm not criticising anyone who found these plot points satisfying. I'm just saying that I didn't.

> I guess you've lived a sheltered life with your peacekeeper dad, but our oppression by the gems is ongoing.

The hypocrisy of this characterisation is revealed in short order.

> "Here's another question for you," PeeDee cut in, much calmer than his brother. "Why is the library the only place here that's always kept locked?"
> 
> This felt like a rhetorical question, but there was a silence Connie felt compelled to fill. "I guess because the books are..."
> 
> "Because," PeeDee interrupted, "knowledge is the only thing you can take out of the settlement that they can't find by searching you."

I think PeeDee's off the mark with this one; it doesn't really make any sense. They lock up the library because many of the books are irreplaceable.

> "If you try and mess with that thing, you're only liable to end up hurting yourself. Even if it did work," Ronaldo continued, "I don't foresee a happy life for our friend were she to go free. You heard how often she got found out by her so-called comrades in times past. The next time she got damaged, I dare say she wouldn't be finding any sympathetic humans to take her in."

End up hurting yourself, you know, like she literally ends up doing in order to free Amethyst. Really this was a bit of a self-indulgent thing for me to include.

Nothing is ever black-and-white. Ronaldo may have ideological reasons for wanting Amethyst to stay the way she is, but it's also not like he's entirely wrong in what he says here. Last time Amethyst got her gem damaged, she was on a planet still ostensibly run by humans. Next time, she'd be in real trouble.

> The thought of her own family being split up made her feel sick.

Uh, how does Connie know what being sick feels like? Hmm? 0/10, plot is riddled with holes

> Connie wondered how many custodians Amethyst had had over the centuries. Did they all truly care about protecting her, or did it merely make people feel good to turn the tables on the gems, by keeping one of their own in captivity? By holding power over a being so powerful?

And now what's she on about? Way to cast judgement on a swathe of altruistic humans.

> For each novel idea there was an evasion or an excuse, and people would forever muddle along the well-trodden path. Maybe this was what came of spending your whole life in one settlement?

Being in on this secret does seem to have given Connie a bit of a superiority complex. In addition to feeling smug around people still caught up in the petty concerns of the settlement, now she assumes she's somehow special for having moved house.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 15](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/52331935).

It was at this point that I realised I needed to actually plot out the remainder of the story rather than just writing scenes at random. Perhaps I should have been doing this all along, but I'm new to long-form fiction, so be nice.

So, I wrote the following checklist (I think I added a couple of these entries as I went along, but never mind about that):

> kids come back -- Onion's house raided  
> connie asks PD why he didn't tell her ("I did, just now.")  
> awkward dewey lecture on resettlement  
> vidalia confronts connie
> 
> kids being weird around her  
> connie begins writing letter
> 
> another raid  
> connie hides in house  
> eavesdrops on Zircon & doug  
> soil samples are destroyed  
> ronaldo suggests hiding A in Lars house  
> connie asks mother about gem implant  
> doug has spoken to Z about minimum populations
> 
> considers ways to remove implant — dangerous  
> looks in dictionary
> 
> another amethyst scene? gulliver  
> greg scene? before bakery  
> something about the weather
> 
> thematically apropos lesson? writing assignment  
> next day lunch in library  
> epiphany!  
> get mom's key after lesson, finish letter
> 
> sneaks out at night and heals amethyst
> 
> end

The one that didn't end up being a thing was Mr Dewey - the idea was that (we would infer) Doug had a word with him about Connie's doubts about the status quo, and he would contrive to bump into Connie and launch into an unprompted sales pitch about how great the settlement system is.

> Chapter 15: The Sentry's Insight

Not a great title, but I couldn't come up with anything better. It emphasises the pivotal nature of Jasper's outburst.

> "Connie," Priyanka interrupted, "it would be a big help if you could prepare your own lunch today."

I hope it's clear that her subtext is "stop talking about this immediately."

> "You're doing well, Connie," Mrs Lezner told her once she had finished. "But you need to commit yourself to the music. Whenever you hesitate because you're worried about playing the wrong note, that throws off the rhythm of the song. Trust your instincts and don't be afraid of making mistakes."
> 
> Connie nodded silently. It was good advice in that it was accurate, but bad in that it forced her to confront the possibility of an underlying flaw in her character.

In addition to being a metaphor about how Connie needs to be proactive, this bit is autobiographical. (It was also pointed out to me that I would tend to accelerate as I approached the end of the song, in my hurry to stop playing.)

> "Do you happen to know whether they might send anyone to tune the pianoforte? It's been such a long time and the lower octaves have become rather dissonant."

HEADCANON: they send a Peridot to tune the piano, because they have perfect pitch.

> "Are these songs composed by Pink Diamond?" she asked, indicating the title page.
> 
> "I don't think so. It only says that Pink Diamond was the patron. So that means it couldn't have been written without her, but not that she herself wrote it."

Still dropping hints about resurrected composers...

> Some of them stared at Connie in a manner that was not entirely friendly.

I wanted to show people losing faith in the justice system, and Connie's reputation being tarnished by association. This sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting towards that end.

> She looked at the houses in whose shelter they were standing. "If we cut through the allotments of these houses, we might be able to see."

Finally Onion's training comes in useful! The old Connie would probably have been too respectful of people's semi-private land to consider such a shortcut.

> "It's, uh, it's not happening," she told PeeDee, a quaver in her voice. "We should leave. I'm going for a walk."
> 
> "But we don't know what's going on," PeeDee objected.
> 
> "Going for a walk," Connie abruptly repeated as she strode off.

I've a sneaking suspicion Connie is channelling Malcolm Tucker in The Rise of the Nutters. Wasn't my intention, but it may have been lurking in my subconscious.

> Until today, Connie had never met a gem who didn't treat her with basic common courtesy. But that Jasper had spoken to her as if she was nothing, a serf.

This encounter wasn't calibrated to fit some meticulously-planned character arc. It just seemed like it should happen. Something needed to shake Connie out of her bubble.

The invocation of pre-gem power structures (serfdom) is more calculated.

> She looked up at the stack of blank paper on the shelf. Would they miss a sheet?
> 
> Perhaps it would be best not to make things worse by stealing. She reached into her pocket and retrieved the folded scrap of wallpaper she was still carrying.

Look, I even put paper right there in the library. You could excise the bit about the wallpaper and lose nothing from the story. Maybe it adds something to the makeshift nature of Connie's letter.

> "Who designed this thing?" she muttered, frustrated.

The obtuse design of the typesetting machine isn't just there to add some ironic levity (and/or destroy any sense of narrative momentum that was building up.) It's intended as a worldbuilding detail. Specifically, even in settlements where technological innovations have been introduced, they have not been subject to a global free market of ideas. There was no competition to make the best typewriter; it was built according to the whims of the first resident who had the skills to construct it. In this case, they ended up with a machine that's terribly over-designed and counterintuitive.

> 'DEAR PINK DIAMOND,'

The decision to have Connie write a letter to Pink Diamond was - surprise - another Half-Life 2 reference. Even though the story contains no overt acknowledgement of the source of inspiration for its setting, it amused me to keep making extremely vague allusions to it. In one of the propaganda broadcasts in City 17, Dr Breen quotes from a letter he has allegedly received, also signed 'a concerned citizen'.

It also amused me that Connie's ultimate act of rebellion (ignoring for a moment the liberation of Amethyst) should be symbolic and potentially inconsequential. Faced with planetary destruction by alien overlords, she writes in to complain.

I subsequently read about how victims of Stalin's purges would write to him asking for help, unable to accept that he was directly responsible for their plight. Just something I found interesting.

> "I've lived here for about five years with no trouble whatsoever. I believe trouble has a way of finding people who go looking for it."

As a teacher under the gems, Mrs Lezner is very much of the establishment.

> "How did you know?" she asked.
> 
> Vidalia smirked. "You gave yourself away. Imitation is itself a kind of flattery, after all."

I don't know whether it was a good idea to put stuff like this in the story. It's a small mystery with a specific solution that's never made explicit in the text. Vidalia saw Connie's pumpkin lantern, which in turn was unconsciously inspired by the painting. I don't know whether people would have got this, and I don't know whether it would be reasonable to expect them to. I'm aware that fan fiction is the pulp of the internet era, and people generally aren't going to be inclined to double back and pore over old chapters for clues. (It might have been easier for readers on Fanfiction.net, where the lantern was the thumbnail image.) Or maybe I've misjudged the whole thing and it was actually super obvious to everybody?

Anyway, the actual reason I did it this way was because I thought the characters would seem more real if they are shown to be capable of making their own inferences, and sometimes possessing knowledge that is not revealed to Connie. And that when they are not in the story they are still out there, doing things and thinking things. Having inner lives and such. You have a better idea than I do of whether this was in any way successful.

> Without saying anything more, she rose from her chair and carried it back into the house, leaving Connie none the wiser.

Also, Vidalia's departure immediately after this conversation indicates that she was only sitting outside to wait for Connie.

> I think they had a marimba, but it had lost a lot of its notes in a freak weather event.

This sentence is carefully constructed to be entirely comedic.

> Don't you think you'd worry about ending up in some little row of houses that only grows turnips?

Oops, I forgot about this. Okay, I restricted myself to TWO references to turnips.

> "...we're all different from each other. We don't fit into identical types like them. Do they understand, that it's not the same to go and live with a different set of humans?"

I enjoyed having characters contemplate the differences between the human condition and the, uh, gem condition.

> Her father looked at her, thoughtful. "It's tricky," he said.

This scene is about as close as Connie gets to outlining her concerns in full, and it's to Doug's credit that he doesn't dismiss them outright. He may be a tool of the Diamond Authority, but he's still trying to do the best he can for people. It will be shown that this conversation weighs upon him enough that he later questions Zircon about it.

> It wasn't clear whether he was about to add anything further, and the point became moot when the front door opened as Mrs Maheshwaran returned home. By unspoken consensus, the discussion was at an end.

Priyanka is somewhat tarred as a Lady Macbeth figure in this whole thing. Maybe a bit unfair? But she was already established as the disciplinarian of the family.

> Her mom seemed genuinely interested. "Which children didn't come back?"

Definitely fishing for information on possible accomplices.

> The three of them adjourned to sit for a while, and indulged in some word games to pass a little time before dinner.

This ended up segueing into a bit about the organic regulator, but it wasn't the original purpose for the scene. It was more that I felt I'd failed to establish what kind of things people do in their spare time. It can't all be talking about farming or food or whether the gems are good or bad. If I can't write a small slice of life in a pre-industrial society, then I'm just the same as those kids writing Over The Garden Wall fiction who can't imagine what it would be like to be alive in the 1980s.

> When this became tiresome, they played a couple of rounds of Game-of-Twenty.

I just want to point out that I genuinely researched the origins of Twenty Questions. In this version they don't say animal-vegetable-mineral, because that would be confusing. And possibly offensive.

> "I believe it's standard procedure. In the days before your birth I was taken to a gem facility where the procedure could be supervised. It's safer for the mother and baby, regulator or not. When the time came, they put me to sleep, and when I woke up, there you were."

This wasn't a detail I was looking for an opportunity to write, but was manufactured from thin air during this scene. With childbirth being so dangerous, it seemed to make sense.

> "Your regulator can protect you, but it can't work miracles. That's why you must always be careful around sharp tools or farming equipment. Haven't you seen Samuel's eyepatch?"

Phew, that was close. We almost went the entire story without it being explained why someone would have an eyepatch.

> "Her power must be truly immense," Connie said earnestly, "to have enough for every human."

This conversation is another of the pillars on which Connie's final deduction rests: the power requirement for healing all humans.

> She had to find another way.
> 
> Still... it could be worthwhile looking for some information on anatomy. Just in case.

This is the tension that drives much of the rest of the story. I knew by this point how the story would actually end, but for a while I had struggled with the idea that the only option left was for Connie to attempt amateur surgery, which would be a difficult plot development to take seriously. And not appropriate behaviour for a role model for young girls. Even though Connie ultimately abandons the idea, I still worry it borders on the absurd.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 16](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/52601965).

This is structurally an odd chapter, and contains what I consider some of the weakest material in the story. We're in the second interstitial period of the story, where I wrote some material to establish that time had passed. I didn't write very much material, though, and I told myself I'd add some more before the chapter went up. Inspiration failed to strike, and what I added was pretty lacklustre.

In fact, more than half of this chapter might never have existed. What I initially wrote was the brief conversation with PeeDee, and Connie consulting the encyclopaedia and dictionary. That's less than a thousand words. Then, by chance, it became necessary to add another Amethyst scene, because of later key shenanigans. I decided when Connie visits Amethyst for the last time before healing her that she should let her have the key. Then I realised this meant Ronaldo could demand to have it back (making their falling-out more final) and be unable to retrieve it (so Connie could still get back in.) _Then_ , I realised that if Connie gives away the key _right before_ Ronaldo asks for it back, it's going to look really contrived. So she'd need to give Amethyst the key in an earlier scene. So I had to go back and insert another scene with Amethyst.

Makes sense? Good.

> Chapter 16: Extracurricular Studies

I considered titling it Chirurgery.

> She managed to find a page about organs in the science dictionary, but it only featured reams of text about some mythic wind-powered pianoforte. After racking her internal thesaurus, she instead looked under V for viscera.

We return to the real 18th-century encyclopaedia. As previously stated, I decided that only one half of the alphabet would be available, so the information Connie finds here is exactly what would be available to her under these circumstances.

> According to the book, there had been some debate amongst human scientists as to the actual function of this organ, or whether it in fact served any function at all. There was a certain kind of sense to their arguments — there were two lungs and two kidneys, so an organ might well form purely for the sake of symmetry.

The bit Connie is reading runs as follows:

_The Use of the Spleen has been disputed in all Ages; both, as no immediate Use thereof appears from Dissection, and as we find, that Animals from whom it has been cut, live very well without it. All the Effects, e. gr. following the cutting of it from a Dog, are, that the Animal grows more Salacious than usual; that it urines more frequently; is more hungry than ordinary; and for the first Days is troubled with a Vomiting and Nausea. 'Tis added, That 'tis necessary the Part be taken away to make a good Runner._

_Hence some have imagined that the Spleen only served to make a Balance in the Weight of the Body; others, that it was only intended for the sake of Symmetry; others, a useless Load, and one of Nature's Redundances; others, a Pit or Common-Shore to discharge the Foeces of the Blood into; others a Fire, by the Heat whereof, the Action of the Ventricles is animated._

> _SURGERY: see CHIRURGERY._

Given the restrictions I had already put in place, this is exactly what I found when I looked up surgery. I couldn't have planned it any better myself.

> Connie's mind then turned to the civic hall. Mr Dewey wasn't involved in the search for Amethyst, and he had written that play, so he must be reasonably well-read. Connie decided it couldn't hurt to go and ask, if she was subtle about it.

This scene, and the subsequent scene with Jenny, were hastily written in the few days before publication. I am not especially happy with them.

> "Oh!" Barbara glanced around before giving an apologetic grimace. "It was only that your dad asked me something similar a while back."

I decided that Doug would have looked for information on what books people owned, in case any of them seemed in any way suspicious.

> She gave a hopeful glance past Barbara. "Would it be possible to..."
> 
> "I'm afraid Mr Dewey can't be disturbed," Barbara interrupted, suddenly businesslike.

I wanted an opportunity to hint at the existence of Buddwick's journal, but in the end I couldn't get Connie the access.

> Connie was never sure how to respond to sarcasm. "I just went in to ask a question."
> 
> "I'm joking, silly."

Isn't it annoying when that happens? Sometimes you just can't tune into the right banter-wavelength.

> Jenny leaned down with a conspiratorial grin. "You didn't hear it from me, but one time I heard a rumour that the Dewey family has lived here ever since the settlements began."

Again, partly a parallel to Mayor Dewey's ancestor in the show, and partly a hint that there could be something unusual going on with the Deweys in this timeline.

> "Did you supply a fish to Ronaldo recently? You or Kiki?"
> 
> Jenny's smile was forced. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

I wanted Connie to have a chance to voice this question, even if she doesn't get an answer. It ended up as a pretty dull scene, though. I considered writing a scene where Connie sees a gem spaceship, seeing as these were alluded to many chapters ago and never brought up again. In the end, though, I didn't. Ah well.

> The liver, for example, (apart from as 'One who lives',) was only described as 'One of the entrails.' This was followed by some fancy Shakespeare quotes that did little to make up for the book's general uselessness.

That's a fancy edition of Johnson's dictionary, though, if it's got all the quotes after the definitions.

> Picking her way up the hill, she wordlessly acknowledged a goat with a distinctive twist to its horn, whom she had nicknamed Connie Junior.

The good thing about goats being one of the more efficient forms of livestock is that Connie gets to be Steven by naming one of them after herself.

I suspect you wouldn't actually keep goats on a coastal hillside with no real shelter.

> Amethyst looked slightly embarrassed. "I was just filling some time. Pretending to be a lizard."

Amethyst has independently invented the game Nightcrawlers, in solitaire form.

> "But my guess is, Pink Diamond saw how humans used to carry on with just their own technology, and decided it would be better if they didn't catch up."

The most accurate oracular pronouncements are the ones that happen when you aren't even trying.

> Sometimes I used to invent new animals to scare humans with, like a flying lizard, or a horse with a beak, or a shark with arms.

My idea with this was that Amethyst's pranks were the originators of such legendary creatures as the dragon (basically a flying lizard) and the mermaid (basically a shark with arms.) The only problem with this idea is that these stories also exist in our own timeline (that of actual real life.) So the logic of it is questionable at best.

Oh, and a beaked horse is effectively a Pegasus.

> "See, this is what's confusing," Connie said. "Whenever I hear or read about life in the old days, it just sounds scary. I don't like how the Diamond Authority has been treating people, but I like being comfortable, and I like being safe. Am I a hypocrite, do you think?"

The people are in a state of existence somewhere between normal life and the show's Human Zoo. Is the loss of freedom better if it is accompanied by safety from all harm? Is it better still if you have no concept of freedom? How much time is it worth taking to consider the moral ramifications of these unlikely sci-fi scenarios?

> "You're too late," Connie playfully taunted. "I'm declaring you an honorary human. Now you're my equal!"
> 
> "Nooo!" Amethyst groaned, collapsing theatrically from her stool. "Now I'll have to start cutting my hair, and stinking the place out with my frankly disgusting bodily functions."

I think the use of the word 'frankly' is a bit out of character for Amethyst, but I found it funny. She originally said 'frankly repulsive', which I find funnier. It took me a while to think of haircuts as the other example of a uniquely human need.

> She descended the hill in a positive mood. Sure, she hadn't really learned anything useful, but Amethyst was the only person she could talk openly with who wasn't far too serious all the time. It was the first time since moving to the settlement that she hadn't felt like she had to watch what she said, and a tension she hadn't realised she was carrying had temporarily lifted.

I'm glad I ended up needing to write this scene, because I feel it is the saving grace of the chapter. I think there would otherwise be a problem of Connie not having spent enough time with Amethyst before freeing her (well, maybe that's still a problem, but if so then at least it could have been worse.)

> Either the goat was learning to tolerate her, or there was something wrong with it.

This is a false dichotomy. In fact, the goat is pregnant.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 17](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/52881073).

> Chapter 17: Audit

A fairly uninspired chapter title.

> "Where I used to live," Connie said, "it might be the sunniest day, and suddenly clouds would blow in and rain on everything, and be gone almost before you knew what was happening."
> 
> Greg chuckled. "Yeah, we get that here sometimes. I guess I don't mind the rain, but I do prefer summer over winter. I miss the cherries," he added wistfully.

There is a subtle implication here that in addition to interfering with the oceans, the gems are also artificially regulating the weather.

Greg remains a cherry-man in all timelines.

> "I always figured the moral of the story was, horses are nicer than people."

Greg must have been a bit young to get all the nuances of the satire. Those horses are pretty arrogant.

> "Isn't it weird how in all these old books, there's never any real mention of gems? At least, not so far as I've seen."

One might almost say that, beyond being weird, it simply doesn't make logical sense. But let's try and explain it away regardless.

> Greg gave a vague shrug.

I just want to say that this is the most representative sentence in the entire story. I feel like I always had characters shrugging, or performing actions in a vague fashion. (I've just done a search and I can confirm that there are 43 shrugs, and 22 vaguenesses. Only here are they married in beautiful synergy.)

The only way it could be more emblematic would be if it was an awkward shrug.

> "Is everyone happy? You're friends with Vidalia, right? Does she seem happy to you?"
> 
> Greg bristled slightly at this.

Probably best not to get into things about Vidalia with Greg. He's not proud of himself.

> "All I know is, self-sufficient farming was identified as the best way for humans to live. Not everybody can be happy all the time, but you know... I'm sure there are limits even to Pink Diamond's power. You can't force people to be happy."

The final pillar to support Connie's epiphany: the finite nature of Pink Diamond's power.

> Connie wondered where Pink Diamond was at that moment, and whether it really mattered.

For a moment, Connie is forced to confront the thought of Pink Diamond as a real being, not an abstract concept smiling out from a painting.

> Mr Pita always seemed angry, even when he was being aggressively polite. Despite his diplomatic phrasing, it felt strangely like she was being thrown out.

Does Mr Pita have something to hide? Not necessarily. But by this point people are getting antsy.

There hasn't been an opportune moment to bring this up, so I just wanted to mention Nanefua. Specifically, why isn't she in the story? Initially I just didn't have any scenes where she was required. Then, when I gave it some thought, I saw a reason to leave her out altogether. This way, you can legitimately ask the question: where are the old people? And then you could ask: wait a minute, how long do those organic regulators keep people alive?

I'm not saying there aren't any old people. The story doesn't confirm anything on the subject, or even mention it. Nanefua may well be in the back of the shop, or at home. She could even be present at the harvest festival, and merely neglected by the narrator.

On the other hand, how many old people do you see in The Zoo episode?

> Connie racked her brains, realising she didn't actually know who Sadie's parents were.

There's the punchline to that particular thread. I hope by now you see how well it is constructed.

> There was something in the boy's constitution that made him sense hardships all the more, and to feel beset by troubles even if they weren't there.

I believe Hamlet said something similar about the First Player.

> Lars was losing patience. "Did you come in here for a reason, or did you just feel like wasting my time?"

This is funnier if you imagine that, while you were reading the preceding paragraph, Connie has just been standing there thinking in silence.

> "Here, have as much as you want. This loaf was on its way out, so I baked these up with some egg and a dash of honey. It's better warm, but... yeah."

Lars has independently invented French toast.

> "The thing is," he continued, "they don't understand their own rules. 'Ooh, don't hoard food!' You know what that really means? We should enjoy it while it lasts. These fools trying to find ways to spin stuff out so we don't need help from the gems, they're the ones hoarding."

Lars sees through the conventions of society! Indeed, there must be a tendency for settlements to violate their own taboo, if there's just a small shortfall in the harvest and they want to avoid a subsidy. And whether they mean to or not, the gems indirectly encourage this through the fictions on which the new society is built.

> She had formulated the kernel of a plan to deal with the Zircon's crew, but this was the first time she'd learned of their presence early enough to put it into action.

I originally wrote 'the vestiges of a plan', but that's no good, is it? That would mean the last remnants, not the first bit.

This is another emergent scene. Given what I had established already, I realised Connie could listen in by going to the house ahead of time. So I had Connie realise this too.

> (Her mom was at some kind of all-day meeting with Mrs Lezner at the civic hall.)

This is convenient, isn't it? Is it a meeting about finding the laziest way for the author to get her out of the way for this scene?

> If so, she could wait here for hours before ever realising that she had wasted her time, and in such an undignified pursuit. (Should the time ever come to tell her story, she resolved to leave this part out.)

Crawling onto a shelf is the weakest part of an otherwise solid plan. Apart from anything else, it's harder to explain if someone walks in.

> The Zircon's muffled tones resolved themselves into comprehensible speech.

A trivia fact about this scene: I wrote the dialogue on my phone while I was away on a training course.

> "I need to be able to do my job going forward. People will resent this and it's going to make things im... extremely difficult for me."

Doug has experience of managers reacting badly to the word 'impossible'.

> "Do you know that I was never made for this task?" There was by now a note of sad exasperation in the gem's voice. "Dealing with the concerns of humans is beyond the natural scope of my cut. And yet I'm expected to achieve the impossible, without sufficient resources, without the support of a Sapphire, without anything. And in the event of failure I will be judged just as harshly as you, if not more so."

"Dealing with the concerns of humans" isn't quite the right phrase, but it was the best I could come up with. What I meant is that although Zircons seem to be sort of gem lawyers, so there's a kind of link to dealing with crimes in the settlements, it's still not at all what they're created for.

She mentions not having a Sapphire, because otherwise it'd be too easy to find Amethyst. (Or would it? Maybe a Sapphire would correctly predict that Amethyst will escape before they can get to her.)

> I'm sure whatever... ill feelings are stirred by this audit will be short-lived.

I didn't spend much time thinking about what to call this, when audit seemed a perfectly serviceable word. Although normally implying a process that will be carried out largely on paper, in this timeline it has connotations of 'your homes will be forcibly searched, and anyone found to have been harbouring fugitives will be taken away and you will never see them again.'

> I will need to requisition additional forces, enough gems and robonoids to supervise the human population while the searches are carried out.

I originally put 'drones' because I couldn't remember the word for robonoids. Which I assume is a portmanteau of robot and android. Robot comes from a Czech word for forced labour and only gained its current meaning in the 1920s, and android was first used in the 1800s to describe an automated chess machine. So it's a bit odd for the gems to be using a combination of these words.

Wait a minute... how come the gems speak English??

> A high proportion of local gempower is currently occupied with future preparations.

I had an idea that most of the work of colonising Earth is complete, and they're really just waiting until it's possible to resettle the humans off-world. So one thing they're doing is making sure everything will be in place to fast-track the remainder of the terraforming work.

> "Just tell me this, at least. It's not technology, is it? You're looking for something else." Connie's eyes widened at this. Perhaps her dad was closer to the truth than she had realised, but how had he figured this out?

This is another deduction made by another character that is not explained in the text. But there is a definitive answer which I will give here. Remember that at this point, they have already searched Mr Fryman's shop. Doug has gone in afterwards and noticed that they searched Ronaldo's jars of soil. This wouldn't make sense as a hiding place for machinery, so he has realised they must be after something else.

> Zircon sounded almost amused.

It's not insignificant that Connie starts thinking of the gem as 'Zircon' at this point. Up until now she has been referred to almost exclusively as "the Zircon" or "her dad's Zircon".

> They hadn't outright said what this audit was, but Connie could take a decent guess. A force of gems going from street to street, from building to building, from room to room, and not leaving until they had found what they were looking for.

This is the correct interpretation. I hope enough details were given in the conversation that it makes sense for Connie to guess this. (The phrasing used here is perhaps a little too similar to an infamous Gaddafi speech.)

> He was leaning on the kitchen counter, alternately sipping from a glass of water and staring at its contents with open suspicion.

I think he's projecting, here. The water isn't the problem.

> But just as it's natural for gems to be alike, it's natural for us humans to be different. Since we're all in isolated groups, we need new people brought in so we can maintain that variety. Otherwise, in a few generations people in a settlement would all be the same, which again, we're the opposite to gems so that wouldn't be good.

So many sci-fi authors fall into the trap of failing to dedicate several paragraphs to explaining why the characters aren't all massively inbred. In all seriousness, though, this fulfils two functions. First, it's actually a fairly valid reason for moving people around. It was important that the gems should have believable explanations for their behaviour, so it doesn't seem too odd that most people accept it at face value. (Although what Zircon said is true, that doesn't mean they don't also move people in order to remove sources of dissent.)

The other reason to bring this up is that it hints at Pink Diamond's ultimate goal. They've researched genetics so they can figure out how many humans are required in total for a sustainable population.

> "It's fine," he said, thoughtful. "Everything's fine."

What would be a fairly humdrum line is lent a spurious sense of gravity by ending the chapter. Whatever doubts Doug might have, he keeps them to himself.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 18](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/53123725).

> Chapter 18: On The Fragility Of Insects

The title makes it a companion piece to chapter 4. Only please don't think about this too hard, because there's not much backing it up.

> She shook her head — how had she gotten so paranoid?
> 
> When he saw her approaching, Ronaldo caught her eye and gave a minute but intense shake of his head.

You may have noticed a deliberate juxtaposition here, which offers an answer to Connie's question.

> At once, she remembered there was someone else she could confide in. Her aimless trudge gained direction and momentum as she veered first toward the stables, before passing them to mount the hill leading to the windmill.

Not only did this next scene prompt me to add in an earlier Amethyst scene in chapter 16, this Amethyst scene itself came about through the writing process. Initially I had Connie go straight to the Fryman shop and start the confrontation with Ronaldo, but I was finding it a difficult scene to write. Then it struck me that part of the problem was that it didn't ring true for Connie to go straight to Ronaldo with this news, when they have diametrically opposing goals by this point. So I was motivated to have her visit the windmill first.

> It didn't seem worth striking a light when Amethyst wouldn't benefit.

Connie continuing to neglect her own needs in favour of Amethyst.

> It was tougher way back when they used to ask me stuff about how to fight their wars and run their societies. It's not like I know much about anything like that, so I mostly just used to keep it vague and let them draw their own conclusions. 

This is the fruit of about five minutes of research on the Oracle of Delphi.

> "It might also be the gem thing," Connie ventured, still unclear on the etiquette of disagreeing with Amethyst.

This is a bit out of place. Now that they've had that big chummy scene and shared a good laugh a few chapters back, it's a bit silly to have Connie still thinking she should agree with Amethyst out of politeness. This is what happens when I add scenes and move things about.

> Oh, ha-ha, but yes, it is a compliment.

The 'ha-ha' here is meant to be a slightly sarcastic spoken enunciation of laughter, equivalent in meaning to "yes, I get the joke, well done." This is difficult to convey in passing. I tried changing it to 'har-har', but that didn't help.

> "You're already plenty like us — don't forget you're an honorary human,"

When I first wrote this scene, Connie said something along the lines of "you've been around humans so long you could be considered an honorary human." Then I went back and wrote almost the exact same dialogue in chapter 16, having forgotten I'd already done it. So I had to alter the line here to just be a callback.

> "Which book? I might know it, people used to read books to me."
> 
> "Um, it's about a man called Lemuel Gulliver who travels around lots of places."
> 
> "Yeah, I remember that one."

You may be wondering why the story had to be put on hold so the characters could form a literature discussion group. The short version is, I found myself thinking about the plot of _Gulliver's Travels_ and realised it was surprisingly applicable to this setting. I couldn't resist explaining this in tedious detail, so I went back and added some scenes establishing that Connie is trying to find a copy of the book, in order to justify the denouement in this scene.

The fact that first _Micromégas_ and then _Gulliver's Travels_ both seemed weirdly significant is too much to be a coincidence. After giving it some further thought, I concluded that it was in fact inevitable: both are works of satire, and an effective way of satirising human behaviour is to depict it through the eyes of non-human characters. Since this will generally be a negative portrayal of humanity, it will thus be easy to draw parallels to gem propaganda. Humans are selfish, violent and wasteful; non-humans are wise and rational and baffled by humanity's destructive instincts.

> The resemblance to the gems' vantage point over humanity's folly was uncanny, and it was fascinating to have it confirmed that even back then, people like the author of this book had understood humanity was losing its way.

The book is exactly the same as in our universe, and Connie's analysis is therefore substantially incorrect.

> For a human to live forever would be in some ways a prison.

Hmm, I wonder if this assertion will later come to hold any significance

> Finally, she listed raptly as Amethyst retold the tale of the Hoonems, the intelligent horses that had had such an unconscious influence on Greg.

Of course it's spelled Houyhnhnms, but neither of them have ever seen it written down. Funnily enough, Hoonem is practically a phonetic anagram of Human. I didn't incorporate this into the discussion, but I could well have done.

> "The Hoonems put them to work for their own good," Amethyst mischievously pointed out.

Pink Diamond doesn't want to house humans in a utopia where they don't have to do anything. Her express goal is to preserve their culture. Specifically, the aspects of their culture that she finds palatable.

> A jar of apple vinegar on the kitchen windowsill at home was cloudy with drowned insects, but she decided it would be counterproductive to mention this.

This is directly inspired by some flies who invaded my kitchen and regrettably had to be euthanised.

> "...it's just a fly," Amethyst nodded. "They die in the winter anyway.

Amethyst has a firm grasp on the life cycle of insects.

> "But it's easy for me to say that," Amethyst finally admitted, "when it's just a question. The truth is, if I really had a chance to escape the Diamond Authority for good? I don't know what I'd be prepared to do."

What's happened here is that I wrote that bit about flies that I was quite pleased with, and then suddenly decided that Amethyst should in fact give the opposite answer. So she immediately negates everything she just said. This constitutes poor editing on my part.

> She was about to make her excuses and head out, when another thought struck her.
> 
> "Next time I come back, I don't think you should answer the door regardless. It's not safe unless you're certain who's there."

As already alluded to, this was when she gave Amethyst the key in an early draft. The sequence was removed from in between these two paragraphs. Fortunately I still had Connie's subsequent paranoia about special knocks, which could remain here as a button to the scene.

> "I could smell it on her," Ronaldo grimly intoned. "That was boiling vegetable oil. You've no idea how tough they are. And now they've come in here and wrecked everything."

The point is about how resilient the Jaspers are. (I can't think of any other reason why I would want to conjure an image of Jasper all greased up in fryer oil.) Ronaldo has been faced with an avatar of the might of the Diamond Authority, and it's forced him to rethink his complacent assessment of how simple it would be to fight them.

> "They've ruined my experiments. My soil samples? All destroyed, they smashed all the jars. That was years of work — years! Why do that unless I was getting too close to the truth?"

They searched the jars because they would have been a good hiding place for Amethyst's gem. (Which wouldn't have been so different from PeeDee's very first suggestion...)

> Ronaldo had one hand to his forehead, squinting in deep thought. "It's only that policing of the settlements is meant to be carried out by the peacekeeper with minimal intervention from the Diamond Authority. We know this stuff from our mom," he explained.

Ronaldo is deeply in denial by this point, both about his fear of the gems and the imminence of their discovery.

> Ronaldo's so-called theories were absurd, yet contained kernels of plausibility that were insidiously compelling.

Again, some things are constant across all timelines.

> "Precisely. We hide her in a house that's already been searched. Lars's house, to pick an example at random. The gems are big on efficiency, so no doubt they'll skip over it even if they do carry out this 'audit'."

Ronaldo is also in denial about the fact that his new plan has been invalidated before he could even announce it. He didn't think of it until now, because I myself only thought of it at this point in the story.

He suggests Lars because there is a precedent for Ronaldo trying to sacrifice Lars to the gem in the basement of the lighthouse.

> "If you're so convinced of your theory," Connie wearily responded, "you should be hiding her in here."
> 
> "You're misrepresenting my plan," he haughtily admonished her. "Obviously it wouldn't work here, the Diamond Authority considers me an enemy. PeeDee and I have our own well-being to consider."

This is a short scene, but one that I found difficult to write. The above exchange is the product of me glaring suspiciously at the preceding text for some time.

> "I'm sorry about what happened to your mom," she addressed them, trying to control her voice, "but you've got the wrong priorities. It's given you this crazy idea about fighting the Diamond Authority, and you know that can't work, right? You must know. I don't know what the solution is, but using Amethyst as a mascot for some imaginary rebellion is just endangering her and everyone in the settlement. You're keeping her locked up like... like a trophy, when it's just made this situation inevitable. I... I think she can be healed, if we just put our heads together and figure out..."

Connie's final attempt to reconcile with Ronaldo is way off the mark. Nobody's ever figured out how to heal Amethyst, so it isn't helpful to blame them for keeping her in the settlement. And invoking their recently-exiled mother is woefully misjudged.

> Seeing Ronaldo's expression, she realised too late the danger of reasoning with a madman.

Her opinion of Ronaldo never fully recovered from the day he showed off that heretical machine.

> In the fading light of the settlement, Connie's anger and frustration at the inadequacy of her parting shot rapidly gave way to a quiet despair.

It seemed structurally necessary for Connie to have a dark night of the soul before things could be resolved.

> "We went to the stables and Mr DeMayo said you'd left hours ago. We've been worried sick. Where on earth have you been?"

This final bit with Connie's parents may be a bit under-written. At one point I intended to expand it, but it's just the coda to a chapter that's already long enough. Anyway, a couple of things bother me about this. Firstly, the use of the actual phrase 'worried sick', which is an unlikely metaphor in a world with no disease. Additionally, it's fine for them to be angry at Connie for being late, but isn't worrying about her a response more specific to our culture? The settlements are very safe, so what in particular is there to worry about? (Maybe they thought she drowned...)


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 19](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/53368837).

> Chapter 19: Visions Of The Future

A working title for this chapter was Imagined Futures. It referred both to Connie's short work of in-universe sci-fi, and her pessimistic projections for her own short-term future. It was close to the date of publication when I realised this only needed a slight adjustment to give it oracular overtones. I nearly called it Future Visions, but decided that was too on-the-nose.

> (At least, none that were morally sustainable. She'd been plagued in the night by intrusive thoughts of forcing Ronaldo to volunteer for the task.)

I almost forgot to add this parenthetical bit. Using someone else's regulator might work, but it would also be murder. Still, I wanted to establish that she hadn't failed to consider the ramifications at all.

> Then she handed a piece of paper to the girl who always sat in the front row. "Let's hear from a few of them. Here, I'm sure everyone would like to hear your story."

The text is really straining to avoid giving the girl a name by this point. Surely the teacher would use it when addressing her.

> It was a hard life in the city of Paris Twelve.

It probably speaks for itself, but I am pleased with the joke of the kids not really getting how place names used to work. She's heard of Paris, but assumes it must have been one in a series. Can't have a place name without numbers, right?

> She had almost forgotten the story, which she had hastily written one afternoon before the harvest festival. It was back when she had yet to meet Amethyst, but still had a lot of things on her mind that seemed more important than writing assignments.

This seems to imply it was after seeing Ronaldo's potato battery, but the narrative follows Connie from that point to the harvest festival without her ever writing anything, so what's going on? The timeline of events doesn't make sense. Maybe she wrote it on the day of chapter 9 and I just didn't mention it, because I am an unreliable narrator.

> She stood up and awkwardly made her way to the front, accepting the paper from a smiling Mrs Lezner. She cleared her throat, and read without affect.

This whole scene is reverse-engineered around the image I wanted to convey: a despairing Connie reluctantly reading out a story full of futile optimism which she no longer believes in.

> "I live in a place called Emerald Town with my parents and my brother and sister.

Connie is an efficient storyteller. In her first sentence she establishes that towns have been named in honour of the gems and that multi-child families are routine again.

> They say we learned how to make things grow again from a race of people called gems. Nobody knows for sure who they were, or where they are now, but we remember their lessons every day.

Given that, at the time she wrote this, Connie didn't know the gems come from space, I'm not entirely clear where she thought they were going to go. Perhaps in her version of the future, the gems have transcended this dimension, their work complete. Like elves.

> "I have friends in a nearby town called Barley Town. It takes a few hours to ride there in a mechanical vehicle.

Other places are, of course, named after staple crops. Connie's imagination extends to mechanised transport, but not to mechanised transport that is particularly quick. (Presumably this is set soon after the ban on technology was lifted, and there are still further developments to be made.)

> From their town it's possible to visit a forest with all sorts of creatures, but you have to be careful or you could get lost.

Even in an optimistic version of the future, Connie exhibits anxiety about the dangers inherent in freedom.

> Off in the distance is a huge tower where gems used to live.

I was thinking of City 17's Citadel, a structure that really rubs your face in the fact that you lack the technology to make a building that tall.

> "Every town is run by an administrator.

No more civic leaders! Instead we will use a different and yet equally bureaucratic term. Also, Dr Breen was the administrator of Black Mesa (and then Earth.) So it's kind of a tribute to the fact that I came up with 'civic leader' to avoid using this word in the first place.

> "Very imaginative, Connie," the teacher nodded, smiling. "It makes you want to hear more."

Here I am using one character to praise the story written by another character, but which ultimately was written by me. And it carries the oblique implication that the story containing them shares the same attributes. This may appear arrogant, but in fact it is my way of apologising for writing an open ending.

> PeeDee cut her off. "Look... Mom put Ronaldo in charge. That counts for a lot, even if..." He looked around shiftily. "I can't talk about it here," he concluded, and darted out.

Here is another instance of me cutting a character off rather than letting them explain something fully. Remember in that episode where Ronaldo thought he had proof that Sneeple were real, and had a terrified Peedee helping him interrogate Steven? That's PeeDee the whole time in this timeline (only less terrified.) No matter his assessment of his older brother's character, he's grown up accepting Ronaldo as the expert.

> She had a sense that things were going to play out as they would, regardless of her involvement.

Connie feels powerless in this moment, but it's just a feeling. I tried to give Connie agency and not fall into the trap of writing a wholly passive protagonist. Sure, she was led by the nose through the first ten chapters, but after that she was free to pursue her own agenda.

> Connie winced involuntarily. It was beyond her imagination. How could she have been so reckless as to consider risking anything like this?

I wanted to show Connie prepared to badly injure herself to save Amethyst, in order to establish the low point she had reached. But with this established, it seemed equally important to establish that this categorically was not going happen (because it would be ridiculous.) Extracting the regulator was never a real possibility, but only by considering it was Connie able to reach the true answer. In this respect, it is rather like the square root of minus one.

> The **Idea** didn't come from any particular direction, it simply appeared in her mind as if it had always been there. She stared off at nothing as associated thoughts bloomed in her consciousness.
> 
> _There are limits to even Pink Diamond's power. The organic regulator is a conduit for her power. The power to heal humanity._

My hope is that Connie's thought process here makes sense in retrospect, and that having read the ending, you would think "yes, I see now how she reached that conclusion." The storyline came about from my desire that she should have to work her way through a number of ideas before arriving at one that would work. But I like to think that in its final iteration, the solution also requires Connie to go through some character growth and stop seeing Pink Diamond as this perfect, omnipotent being.

I have no idea whether that's how it comes across. Maybe you just found it arbitrary.

> Some of these figs would only grow in the presence of a special type of bee that didn't produce honey.

Was this really the right time and place for trivia about the cultivation of figs? Probably not, but it is nice to have confirmation that wasps have no place in Pink Diamond's utopia. (A friend told me that wasps actually fill a vital niche in the ecosystem, but is anybody buying this? And even if so, is it really too high a price to pay for the destruction of these evil insects?)

> "Um... well... I suppose I think the purpose of art is..."
> 
> Mrs Lezner stared expectantly.
> 
> "...to achieve immortality."

This is a strange way for Connie to phrase her opinion, almost as if the author only made her say it for purposes of foreshadowing.

> Connie turned her attention from Mrs Lezner as the other students began to gather their things, and was faced with the sight of PeeDee staring at her as if she had just performed an impossible magic trick.

Because she managed to shut Mrs Lezner up, in case that wasn't clear.

> "Good afternoon, Mom. I need to finish some work in the library. Is it fine if I use your key?"

This is one of those situations where the substitution of 'fine' for 'okay' really feels less natural than leaving it as it was. But the word 'okay' doesn't exist in this timeline, so my hands are tied. (In retrospect, I should have gone with 'alright'.)

> Alongside this difficulty, she never felt entirely sure when it was or wasn't appropriate to capitalise nouns.

This must be a source of confusion, with access to a mix of archaic and contemporary books and no standardised curriculum.

> In the end, she decided to describe herself in bland and factual terms.

...'as a concerned citizen', is how the sentence originally ended. It's not like anyone would lose sleep over this cliffhanger, but it's still a bit redundant to present this as a (small) dilemma and then tell you the answer ahead of time. Especially when it's one of the more blatant Half-Life 2 references.

> Buck grinned. "I don't see why people should stay away. Nothing was found. And that business from a few months back is all in the past. I was sorry to hear how that all turned out, by the way."

Buck just seems vindictive here. Look, without his established friend group he turned out a little odd. Most of the time he is the Buck from act 2 of Shirt Club.

> "My dad never talks to me about work stuff," she recited.

'Recited' was an amendment based on the fact that I lost count of how many times I had her say this.

> "Maybe that's wise," he said. "But at some point, you've got to get on and live life. Can't stay young forever."

I hesitate to even mention this because it's creepy, but the other aspect to Buck in this universe is that he's stuck in the settlement indefinitely, with a limited number of people in his age group, any of whom could be arbitrarily removed at any point. So it's possible he may have considered that one day he will be in his early twenties and Connie will be in her late teens, and who knows whether Jenny or Kiki or Sadie will still be in the picture. I had no intention whatsoever of this coming up in the story, but it did inform some of these scenes.

> Maintaining eye contact with PeeDee, she took his hand and placed the key in his palm. PeeDee dropped it in a pocket of his apron, recoiling slightly at the intensity of her manner.

This is kind of a mirror of Amethyst giving Steven the hourglass in the pilot episode.

As I think I've alluded to, the whole thing with the keys just kind of fell together after I decided Connie should give her key to Amethyst. Having established that Ronaldo would ask for the key back, it was only a while after this that it occurred to me there was exactly one other key in the story, and an opportunity for Connie to pull a switcheroo.

> "Take some wedges. Just to say no hard feelings. And because... well, just because."

There's no comprehensive closure to the story with regard to Connie's relationships within the settlement, so it seemed important to indicate that her friendship with PeeDee isn't irreparable.

> Connie accepted the bag, its aroma making her very aware she had skipped lunch.

There is probably something symbolic about Connie skipping lunch. (The final taboo!) Feel free to write your own analysis in the margins.

> She observed Mr Smiley leaving the bakery with a fresh loaf, and others en route to the boardwalk for dinner.

Here I briefly establish that Mr Smiley doesn't simply cease to exist at the end of each festival. What a complete and living universe this is.

> What she hadn't fully thought through was how she would get away with no longer having her mom's key to the education centre. Necessity being the mother of invention, she had considered it better to simply give it away and hope for the best.

I originally wrote "she had considered it better to simply give it away and thus incentivise herself to come up with something." I had to change this because, as you can't fail to have noticed, Connie doesn't actually come up with anything, she just gets by through arbitrary dumb luck. I'm pretty sure this violates the writing principles established by Pixar.

> Uncertainly, and without knowing why, Connie pushed her luck. "Do you... need it now..?"
> 
> A moment passed. Then, Priyanka shook her head. "As long as you haven't lost it," she said.

It's probably a weakness that there's no real conflict or jeopardy left for the rest of the story. Ideally I should have come up with some final obstacle between Connie and the windmill. If you were being charitable, you could posit that Connie's response here constitutes a (surprisingly) successful bluff, and Priyanka might otherwise have demanded the key. I know of real-life examples where deception has been sold by means of an empty offer to provide evidence. But it's still a bit thin, isn't it?

> If it was behind the lack of conversation, then it was either because he didn't want to give anything away, or because they both didn't. Could it be that all three of them were bound to silence by this Damoclean threat?

This whole paragraph is a convoluted bit of speculation, but I am pleased with the use of 'Damoclean'.

> The centrepiece of the meal was a chicken leg, the unfortunate fowl having breathed its last and been subsequently divided up between several families.

'Breathed its last' is a bit euphemistic; I assume they slaughtered it after it stopped laying. The rationing out of meat indicates its scarcity. In fact, it's the first time the Maheshwarans are shown with meat on the table.

You might expect a race of aliens presenting themselves as morally superior to condemn the eating of animals. But I assumed that as inorganic mineral people, they would view eating a chicken as substantively no different from eating a vegetable. It's all self-replicating colonies of cells, isn't it? Those organics are always eating each other, it's just what they do.

> "I believe it's thirty fruits per household."

I had to have a think about what was a reasonable amount.

> The synthetic fruit were dense in nutritional content, and a person could comfortably live out a day on just two or three of them.

This seems consistent with their depiction in the Human Zoo, but it also starts to make some of the Maheshwarans' desserts look a bit extravagant.

> "There are worse fates," Priyanka murmured, cutting off a piece of chicken.

The subtext here is a bit blunt, isn't it? "At least the alien overlords don't want to eat us, like in The Twilight Zone or something."

> "That's right," Priyanka agreed. "It's a natural part of growing up. Overcoming those doubts is just a part of life."
> 
> It had never really occurred to Connie before that her parents knew there was something unfair about Diamond Authority rule.

This was a realisation I came to in the writing of this scene, which was handy, because it was a neat end-point for the arc with Connie's parents. It also meant that Connie could move past the argument and feel a sense of cameraderie with her family, which again was necessary because we are left to imagine what their relationship is going to be following the events of this night. It was better to end on a positive note.

> "I'll drink to that." They clinked their glasses together, and for a few minutes the Diamond Authority was banished from the room.

The draft of this scene ended with Connie's previous line about eating delicious food, and a mental note to add something to this and make it into a nice family moment. In the end I was at a loss to actually depict this, so as you can see, I just put some text here telling you that it is a nice family moment.


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Notes on [chapter 20](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/53623876).

> Chapter 20: Covenant Of Protection

I had a placeholder chapter title of 'Farewells', which clearly is generic and terrible. In the end I seized on this phrase from Connie's letter, which was written in advance with no intent on harvesting it for chapter titles. But I decided it kind of works, because Connie's method of saving (protecting!) Amethyst resembles a kind of blood covenant. Even better, this makes it sort of a religious reference, which is the shortcut to looking like you know what you are doing as a writer. (Next time I will have Connie save the day by nailing herself to a cross.)

> When at last she felt enough time had passed, she crept out from under the covers and checked her pockets.

Reading this back, I wasn't entirely clear why she's checking her pockets. I think it's to make sure she hasn't forgotten the letter. Oh, and that the key's still there.

> Moonlight tipped a parabola of waves facing Connie.

Because the light would be reflected off all the waves that happened to be facing the right direction, and these would be the waves that describe an arc centered around Connie. Right? I think so, anyway. I may need to draw this one out as a diagram.

> She found the ocean fascinating — there was an inexorable pull to the treacherous black waters that simultaneously warned you away.

A late addition to the text, echoing Moss Agate's warning in the very first chapter.

> Roughly speaking, the **Idea** ran as follows: perhaps the organic regulator contained a portion of Pink Diamond's power within it, or perhaps it was a medium through which the power was somehow transmitted externally.

I didn't decide whether they literally contain a supply of Pink Diamond's tears, or whether her scientists have developed a method of literally transmitting her power to the regulators. I think Connie's conclusion would be valid in either case.

> This had brought with it the realisation that protecting the thousands of conquered humans at all hours of the day might have been too much even for the almighty Pink Diamond.

I only realised after publication that there's something missing here. She's specifically thinking of the time at the _beginning_ of the occupation, before the human population had been substantially reduced. The theory is that the regulators were designed for use in this context, and even if maintaining full-time healing power over what now remains of humanity would be much easier, there was no point in changing an already working design.

I guess it's implied by describing them as 'conquered humans', but I worry that this carelessly-phrased reasoning could be pointlessly confusing.

> So, what if the regulator were instead to remain dormant until it detected a source of harm, and only then draw upon its mysterious power source?

It would activate when you injure yourself, or when your body is invaded by viruses, or you drink water that's been exposed to bacteria by poorly-maintained pipes, or when you eat a poisonous fungus like an idiot would do.

> "Oh my goodness," Connie exclaimed in a whisper, "you're a parent!" A pair of kids nestled against the dormant beast.

I was on the lookout for stuff from the show I could reference that would also be thematically useful. Here, the goat's offspring are a reminder that the gems' influence is not all-encompassing. The animals have no restrictions on their existence. (Well, this isn't true. They have many restrictions on their existence, but ones imposed by humans.)

> Like an optical illusion it suddenly resolved itself into a trapdoor leading to the upper floors, and she realised she could see what was hanging down from above: a looped chain, used for lifting bulky objects upstairs. Set into almost imperceptible motion by the movement of air from outside, the links were knocking against one another in a slow rhythm.

This bit is inspired by when I was a little kid and we would convince each other the school clock tower was haunted. But I'm not sure whether the fake-out is worth the words expended on it. Try as I might to imply otherwise, there are no obstacles left in Connie's way. Upon realising this, you might understandably feel your time had been wasted.

Maybe PeeDee should have been here, having figured out the deception with the key, and Connie would have to defeat him using the power of friendship.

> "Ooh, breaking curfew! Me likey. Well, come on in."

In case anyone wasn't sure, there isn't a literal curfew. It's just a figure of speech from Amethyst.

> Amethyst sighed. "I've been living on borrowed time for thousands of years. There's no such thing as a foolproof plan, believe me. You might want to cut the guy a little slack, you guys's lives are so short to spend them fighting with each other."

As with PeeDee, since none of the other characters will appear again, I am gesturing at the possibility of a future reconciliation between Connie and Ronaldo.

> In failing to find common ground, perhaps she herself had become an exemplar of humanity's flaws. On the other hand, Ronaldo was clearly wrong and refused to listen to reason, so it was easy to see both sides of this point.

Two things about this. Firstly, it echoes Steven's very brief remorse in Rocknaldo. Secondly, even with all the progress Connie has made, the idea that humans are inferior is still so internalised that she will refer to it out of reflex.

> So what's your idea, if you didn't like Romaldo's?

I hope nobody thought this was a typo. I made it very clear that Amethyst doesn't make the effort to learn people's names.

> "I don't really like to say. I mean, I don't want to give you a false idea of... I mean, I'm just scared of tempting fate."

I realised after writing this (a late addition when trying to flesh out the scene a bit) that Connie prefaces statements with "I mean" twice in a row. This is one of those vocal tics that I apply to dialogue indiscriminately and without really thinking about it, which is one of the reasons most of the characters don't really have distinctive voices. Anyway, even though I immediately realised I had done this, I left it as it is, because my rule was that if I can't make the speech fit the character, I can at least keep it spontaneous. Throughout, I tried to avoid amending the specific phrasing of lines of dialogue once they were written.

> She held the knife in her right hand, wincing in anticipation. Then, before she could change her mind, she jabbed its tip into her left palm and scored a line across it.

I was a little paranoid that people might object to this. It can so easily be summarised as "teenage protagonist saves the day through self-harm." Is this the message we should be putting in our derivative works?

> When she saw that the hairline fracture in the gem was no longer there, she didn't know what to think. She was suddenly aware that the greater part of her mind had never really accepted that this could work, and was consequently at a loss how to react.

I hope this isn't too anticlimactic. If you're not on board with Connie's process of figuring it out, then the resolution probably doesn't have much to offer. My goals for this story were to establish the world it takes place in, and then bring about a change in the status quo through the liberation of Amethyst. Anything beyond this is a bonus, really.

> Then, distracted, she turned over the waxlight in her hands, inspecting it. "Huh. So that's what they look like."

Finally, an answer to the question that nobody was asking. Also, it's not really an answer.

I introduced waxlights as a solution to the fact that I couldn't use gaslights. I always assumed they were an efficient and safe type of lantern fuelled by beeswax. It was only later that I came up with the idea of technological innovations not being propagated across settlements (e.g. the typesetting machine.) So I have since decided that waxlights were manufactured by the gems and distributed to all settlements to make them less susceptible to fires.

> Shaking her head, she threw the device down into the straw where it landed with a clank. "Wow, they really are safer."

Case in point. There is meant to be something a little offputting about this: Amethyst recklessly throws the lantern into flammable straw without knowing whether it will break.

> Unsure what she'd unleashed, Connie chose discretion for the time being.

Amethyst is an unknown quantity at this point. Healed of her injury she is now many times more powerful than Connie, and her agenda is as yet unknown. Connie suddenly finds herself questioning the wisdom of passing on the information that you can repair gems by cutting humans open and healing them with the blood that comes out.

> "Maybe. I think maybe with you gone, Zircon won't have anything left to hold over us. I don't know for sure." Connie shrugged. "What I do know is, we don't have to keep you here to be able to pass on what you've told us. It'll be more of a help for me to know you're out there, somewhere. Doing whatever you like."

I feel this justifies the ending as a win-win for the settlement. No matter what Ronaldo thought, Amethyst was more of a liability than an asset, and they'll be better off with her freed. The task of hiding Amethyst, and the consequences if she was found, would only have stifled the communication of their message within the settlement. Now there's nothing the gems can swoop in and find, the humans can have a more open discourse about the way they are being ruled.

> "Maybe I could catch up to that Prasiolite that had to run her mouth off to an Agate when I forgot to be tall enough." Amethyst made a fist and drove it vindictively into her other hand. "Really get _reacquainted_."

It's not clear how much of this is overexuberance at being healed, or to what extent the length of her imprisonment has affected Amethyst's mental wellbeing. She seems at turns reckless, vengeful and embittered. Justifiable, perhaps, but it leaves a question mark over what she's going to make of her freedom.

Prasiolite is a type of quartz, so I'm picturing another differently-coloured Amethyst clone akin to Carnelian.

> I'll never forget this. I must have forgotten hundreds of humans, but I'll always remember your name.

In this way, Connie herself can attain a form of longevity beyond the end of her own lifespan.

> DEAR PINK DIAMOND,

I wrote the letter in advance, way before I got to this chapter. I probably didn't put as much thought into it as Connie is supposed to have done.

> I ask you to consider that you are being misled by your Advisors, and act to remedy these matters.

'Advisors' is almost a Half-Life reference, but probably doesn't count.

> She stared at the letter for a few moments, before looking back to Connie. "Still haven't stopped changing your alphabet, I see."

It's pedantic, but I realised that if Amethyst has been blind since Ancient Greece...

> They gazed in silence at the expanse of ocean, and Connie wondered if there was anything else unusual about her environment that she was lacking the contextual knowledge to recognise. "Do you think it's because of the Authority?" she asked.

Beyond what she's already learned, here it is beginning to dawn on Connie just how much of an effect the gems must have had on the planet.

> "Back when you worked as an oracle," she asked Amethyst, "where did you used to live?"
> 
> "Place called Hellas," Amethyst said. "In Europe," she added, seeing the blankness on Connie's face.
> 
> Connie contemplated this. "I don't even know which continent we're on."
> 
> "Well..." Amethyst paused. "You know what planet you're on. That's something, right?"

I needed to add some more dialogue to the scene, because Amethyst is about to leave and they don't even know if they'll ever meet again. I wanted something to convey that, even though they sense that it's a momentous occasion, in the end they can't think of much else to say and find themselves exchanging little more than small talk. In the end I wasn't sure what to put, but I realised I might not have made it definitively clear that Amethyst was specifically the Oracle of Delphi. This way, it's probably still not definitively clear, but at least it's definitively supported by the text.

> "If you do visit any other settlements, could you tell them as well? Let them know everything you told me and the others."

So, possible future developments for the timeline include a growing spread of anti-gem counterpropaganda.

> Then, she transformed into a large cat-like creature with sleek purple fur and a long, swishing tail.

It's a purple puma!

> "Take care, Amethyst!" Connie shouted.

The final line of dialogue in the main story, amended from the equally underwhelming "Good-bye, Amethyst!" But there is some significance in the loud utterance of Amethyst's name outdoors, her having previously been spoken of only pseudonymously and in hushed tones.

> The hard soil was ice-cold against her wrists, but it was good to feel like a part of her surroundings.

Conflicted as she may have been throughout the story, Connie's ultimate loyalty is to the Earth. I'm generally too literal-minded for symbolism, but this one was deliberate.

> This one good deed would sustain Connie. Whatever came next, she knew she could regard her life as well-lived.

See, that's enough, isn't it? Right? It was established that she considered Amethyst's wellbeing a higher priority than her own, so from Connie's perspective, saving this immortal being is more than enough story resolution. It would be almost unscientific to dispute this.

> Wondering whether she would ever see the Oracle again, she climbed to her feet, dusted off her hands, and commenced her unsteady journey down the hill towards home.

Er... yeah. It's no "boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past." How about the fact that in the opening sentence, Connie's mother walks downstairs turning off some lights, and at the end Connie walks down a hill while... becoming more illuminated? Does that symbolise anything? It also affirms that by now Connie thinks of the settlement as home.

After a good night's sleep, she'll tell her dad what's been happening and that the danger is gone. They can let the gems carry out their audit without anybody getting in trouble.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes on the [epilogue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20752892/chapters/53888836).

> Chapter 21: Epilogue

Although I liked the idea of establishing this universe from the perspective of characters who are unable to know the whole truth about it, this obviously leaves out pivotal information about what's actually going on. I'd have to be quite stubborn to refuse on principle to give this information to the readers. Hence, the necessity of this epilogue.

I'd previously jotted down a few notes on the direction the dialogue would go, but this was largely written in the week before its publication. Had the entire story been written in real time, every chapter would have been this short.

> Bathed in cold sunlight, beyond the scope of any human viewing apparatus, a domed tower pierced the moon.

Uh, sunlight isn't cold just because you're on the moon. It is in fact very hot. You wouldn't want to go walking on the surface of the moon in bare feet (for several reasons.) Please grant me some artistic license on this.

> Atop her angular throne, Pink Diamond sat surrounded by opulence.

She is living in a gallery of stolen cultural artefacts. I wouldn't describe this fic as a profound exploration of issues surrounding colonialism, primitivism and cultural imperialism. That's not for me to say.

> The artist had portrayed her with a knowing, almost casual smile, seated behind the same console that she occupied now, and although the portrait was centuries old, Pink Diamond looked no different today than she had done when it was painted.

The setting of the portrait suggests that it was painted in this room. Being painted from life, it's more naturalistic than the propaganda portraits. The description of the smile is not intended to evoke Leonardo, but I suppose it couldn't hurt.

> As the small voice on the other end quavered through this new diplomatic minefield, Pink Diamond's limited retinue watched her expression, trying to read the mood.

I'd written down a few things for Pink Diamond to say in the epilogue, and then when the time came to write it up, I suppose it just seemed easier to only write her end of the conversation. It may also come from a perverse impulse to keep things vague, and force readers to fill in the gaps even in the chapter ostensibly designed to make things clearer.

> I am sticking to the timeline we agreed in the first place, as I have been all along. They're the ones holding things up with the completion of the Habitat.

The purpose of writing this conversation was to establish that Pink is awaiting the construction of a new home for humanity. It was written in such a way as to contrive reasons for her to mention this repeatedly. I think this ended up opening possibilities that I hadn't planned out in advance. The arbitrary decision for there to be some delay in construction (so that Pink can vocally complain about it) ends up gesturing to a widening rift within the Diamond Authority that I hadn't really considered when I first devised this setting.

> Who are you to waste my time with such nonsense, even on her orders?

She learned her managerial skills from her fellow Diamonds. Being a messenger caught up in this disagreement would be an unenviable task.

> The specifications of the Habitat were decided upon at the outset.

I put in a line about it needing to house 10,000 humans. Then I took it out again, because it's not something that necessarily has to be nailed down within this story. Also, 10,000 is a very specific round number in base-10, which is a human system, isn't it? For all I know the gems might use something more robust like base-12.

> I don't care what they imagine they can accomplish with polymeric modification!

The polymers in question being strands of deoxyribonucleic acid. The gems have done the science, but that doesn't mean they'd apply significant names to categories of molecules just because they're important to organic biology. Essentially, having promised her a satellite to house ten thousand, the others are now trying to convince Pink to accept a lesser quantity and to keep the remaining humans healthy through gene therapy.

> The population level was decided based on their calculations, so I view any attempt to revise those figures as an admission of _incompetence_.

That is, the Peridots' calculations. Pink wouldn't deploy this level of sass directly at the other Diamonds.

> Beyond the interlocking triangles of the dome, the Earth hung in the sky, damaged but intact.

The question that I decided not to answer here is, exactly how damaged is the Earth? I wanted to leave open the possibility that, were Pink Diamond to abandon her ambitions, the holes could be filled in and the planet could still sustain a certain amount of life on an ongoing basis. Or at least the possibility that you could choose to believe this and not have it directly negated by the text.

> If Blue wants her Lazulis so badly then she can contact me herself.

This whole sequence opened my mind to the possibility that a schism between the Diamonds could still be inevitable. Feeling betrayed by Yellow and Blue, Pink Diamond's response is to effectively hold gems as hostages. She probably sees it more as a negotiating tactic, one where subordinate gems are used as bargaining chips.

> With a shout of frustration, she threw the communicator across the room, where it ricocheted off an ancient stone mural before clattering to a halt across the cold floor.

As well as her behaviour in Jungle Moon, Pink Diamond's depiction here is informed by revelations in Steven Universe Future. However, the intention was that her anger management issues should be exacerbated by contact with the other Diamonds. Her companions realise that they need to calm her down, and then things will be okay until the next disagreement. Given the time scales of gem existence, this could be what, months? Years?

> And yet what does it matter, as long as my fellow Diamonds continue to deny the value of its cultural resources? When they denigrate my aesthetic contributions to the empire?

Another detail that I hadn't planned on. All along I knew that Pink Diamond was acquiring art and artists for the enrichment of Homeworld. It didn't occur to me until the epilogue that her fellow Diamonds should be more or less entirely dismissive of the endeavour, having only gone along with the plan in order to keep her quiet.

> Just when I start to feel things are going well, I'll receive a single curt message and suddenly it's as if I never left.

This is intended to give a sense of the frequency of these episodes. Regular, but not everyday.

> Pink Diamond calmed herself a little. "You always know just the right thing to say," she sighed.

Obviously Pearl has centuries of practice behind her.

> Even a Pearl can understand!

This is possibly inconsistent with the show, but I was focusing on the fact that Pink only really began to consider the rights of lesser gems after beginning the rebellion. Since the rebellion was averted, she's remained in her bubble of privilege and doesn't question the purpose of her subordinates. A Pearl, in the end, is only a Pearl.

> You can't keep humans in a glass enclosure and tinker with their polymers. It runs counter to the principle of preserving their authentic way of life.

The settlements were only ever meant to be temporary. She wants a microcosm of Earth where humans are not separated by impassable geography. They will continue to farm, or perhaps it will be some kind of simulation of farming. Also, I always assumed that artistic expression has been stifled by the settlements, and Pink would hope for a new Renaissance when everybody can communicate freely within the Habitat.

> I'll hold them to their promises and a part of Earth will be safe forever.

The thing is, in the alpha timeline the destruction of Earth was only averted through the destruction of thousands of gems. (Humans too, according to Greg.) I didn't want it just to be that Pink has turned pointlessly evil. She's tried to come up with the best compromise she was able to under the circumstances.

> Blue and Yellow could be destroying sentient life forms even as we speak, when Homeworld could so easily benefit from their cultural resources just as well as the material ones!

At this point I decided the stakes aren't high enough and that I should raise the spectre of Pink Diamond seeking out new civilisations to conquer. Connie's letter had better be reeeeeally convincing.

> Pearl did not meet her gaze. "I only wish that every colony could be touched by your mercy, my Diamond."

I didn't decide how on board with all this Pearl is. You could plausibly read her statement here as ironic.

> If I knew when I started as much as I know now, the whole project could have been completed in a fraction of the time.

The idea of the colonisation being slowed down, to accommodate the peaceful phasing-out of humanity, was an integral part of the setting from before I started writing. But it's also pure plot contrivance, an excuse to set the story in the present day. Once I was faced with writing from the perspective of its architect, this issue seemed to become increasingly prominent. So I felt I had to come up with the in-universe explanation that it came about partly because of Pink Diamond's inexperience.

> Pearl, observing this monologue with concern, suddenly sprang to her feet. "May I sing for you, my Diamond?"

This is DEFCON-1 when it comes to distracting Pink Diamond from her bad moods.

> The pale balletic gem gave a strained smile of compliance.

Pearl still a bit jealous of humans taking her limelight...

> "Play for me, Wolf. Play me something new! Please, something cheerful, and not so melancholy as your recent works."

The idea of Pink Diamond using her resurrection power on Mozart is too ridiculous for words, and yet when this idea occurred to me, I knew I had no choice but to include it. Once you move past the jarring nature of the juxtaposition, you are forced to concede that there was nothing actually stopping her from doing this. I dared not refer to him by name, in case the spell was broken and it came across like a joke.

By happy coincidence, it gave me the opportunity to allude to another Connie-centric AU: the Connie Swap series, in which she has a pet wolf named Wolf.

> Shafts of warm light penetrated the darkness of night in the western hemisphere.

This is meant to be busy warp pads visible from space, but I think it reads more like meaningless flavour text.

> On the threshold of daylight, a cyclone was gradually breaking up as it approached a hole in the ocean.

The wording of 'a hole in the ocean' is a pointless Beatles reference. If you pause the episode It Could Have Been Great, you can see the points at which the gems would have begun hollowing out the Earth. It includes places in the middle of the North and South Atlantic. The forces involved in maintaining the oceans have a disruptive effect on any water in the vicinity. It is at this point that the reader should (I hope) understand what the Lazulis are doing.

> Faced with such a view, who could deny feeling remote from humanity, and from their own humanity? As this afterlife had increasingly numbed him to the physicality of being, he had retreated into his music.

Like most people, my knowledge of Mozart is largely derived from the historically-inaccurate film _Amadeus_. Contrary to the sombre figure portrayed here, he was known for his sense of humour. However, given that a lot of this humour centred around... uh, bodily functions, there is a built-in excuse for him to be more serious. (In canon, it's established that Lars no longer needs to eat. I know Lion can eat, but Lars wasn't hungry in Lars's Head and they didn't bring him any food in Lars of the Stars. I will die on this hill.)

> Although she was always delighted by his ability to produce new songs on demand, she never seemed to notice or care that most were simply variations on earlier works by himself or his contemporaries.

This is based on the (entirely fictional) scene in _Amadeus_ where he adapts Salieri's march into _Non Più Andrai_.

> A cheap parlour trick, serving to keep him in his captor's favour.

It was my intention that other artists may have been sent to Homeworld or other locations. Mozart is one of Pink's favourites, but he knows he's in a precarious situation. Pink is oblivious of the effect this has on him. Recall her interactions with humans even up until We Need To Talk. Though she has affection for them and wants to protect them, she also treats them as playthings. Here, nobody is in a position to correct her on this.

> It was a simple enough matter to transpose the tune into a major key and introduce some arbitrary tonal juxtapositions, and yet beneath the obfuscation, this was once again the final movement of his Requiem.

What are 'tonal juxtapositions'? Nonsense. I was too lazy to look up something more authentically based in music theory.

The Requiem was unfinished in our timeline. In this world, he had the opportunity to complete it. Plus he'd had actual experience of being dead, so he'd really know his onions.

> Now, it was to the Requiem that he found himself increasingly drawn, as the years added up with no sign of any end.

Which is to say that he craves the icy embrace of death. Now _there's_ a proper closing line. (Although I'm still not sure about that first comma.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And I'm done! I hope you were able to derive something of value from this breathtaking exercise in self-indulgence. (In my defence, a lot of that word count is the quotes.) I hope the story still speaks for itself, but I figured that's no reason to be all coy about why I wrote it the way I did. Do the extraneous details make the setting richer, or are they ultimately inconsequential? Or, indeed, was it a mistake to leave them out in the first place? You be the judge!
> 
> Finally, since you've read this far, here's the first time I wrote anything about this setting, in an internet chat log from July 2018:
> 
> `Something got me thinking, could you do something that was not a *crossover* with Half-Life 2, but which had a similar atmosphere?  
> So, supposing the other diamonds didn't dismiss PD's concerns outright, but compromised by allowing her to carry out the colonisation as humanely as possible.  
> Ultimately the Earth will become uninhabitable, but it will take millennia and they will try and work around the organic life as much as possible.  
> For much of prehistory, humans and gems kind of stay out of each other's way. The gems are viewed as mysterious god-like figures.  
> More kindergartens are built and more areas become uninhabitable.  
> There comes a point in history, roughly contemporaneous with the invention of electricity, that the gems finally intervene directly with humanity's development.  
> They present themselves as a vastly more advanced race (true) and explain that they will be shepherding the progress of humanity for its own good (false).  
> They explain that the exponential dwindling of farmable land is due to human overpopulation and poor crop rotation.  
> The gems will now nominate areas for humans to settle, where they will live and benefit from gem science and education.  
> Every human is fitted with a gem-tech implant birth. This harnesses PD's powers to make them immune from all diseases.  
> It also removes their ability to reproduce without permission of the gems, which is granted via lottery in an annual Choosening.  
> Thus the gems will oversee a managed dwindling of the human population as the planet is scoured of its resources.  
> Human scientific development has been halted before the development of any kind of electronic communications, to stop them from organising or learning too much about the state of the world.  
> The disadvantage of this whole concept is, where are the characters?  
> Steven can't exist.  
> Nor Garnet.  
> Pearl is presumably still assisting Pink in the administration of Earth.  
> Beach City and its residents might exist, under a gem-assigned name (Settlement 8E3Y or whatever)  
> Amethyst could be in hiding as she is fit only for harvesting.  
> She and other defective gems made on Earth could be humanity's only source of real information, and even that would consist only of whatever a gem instinctively knows upon emerging.  
> Still, therein could lie the seeds of rebellion.`


End file.
